


Planetshine

by signsandsymbols



Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Friendship, Heists, Iceland, Joe and Nicky are in love, Kidfic, M/M, Mpreg, Nile and Booker are in cahoots, Nile's family, Quynh loves Enya, Tattooed!Andy, The Northern Lights, a manifestation of angels, absurd aliases, background ecoterrorism, discussions of religion, immigration advocacy, murdering tech giants
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-06
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-08 06:47:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 21,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26847664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/signsandsymbols/pseuds/signsandsymbols
Summary: The angels visit them on a sheep farm in rural Iceland, of all places, bubbling wildly out of a pot of mutton stew on the stove. As Joe and Nicky shrink back against the old plaster walls of the shepherd’s house, feathers and eyes and moonbeams coalescing from their dinner’s steam, it’s hailing outside. Many years later, Nicky will recall the sound of ice breaking on the roof, November weather, sheep huddled under the eaves. Joe, when asked, will think past the kaleidoscopic air, rippling up to the ceiling vent like the world’s smallest oasis, to the bulb of garlic on the counter, and how it began to flower. A dead thing, opening itself into two slim green shoots, purple flowers bristling.Joe and Nicky are given a gift.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Booker | Sebastien le Livre/Nile Freeman, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 45
Kudos: 117





	1. Nicky

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: canon-typical violence and body horror (and body…elation?). Flashbacks to World War II and the beginnings of the AIDS crisis. There are also discussions of climate change throughout.

The angels visit them on a sheep farm in rural Iceland, of all places, bubbling wildly out of a pot of mutton stew on the stove. As Joe and Nicky shrink back against the old plaster walls of the shepherd’s house, feathers and eyes and moonbeams coalescing from their dinner’s steam, it’s hailing outside. Many years later, Nicky will recall the sound of ice breaking on the roof, November weather, sheep huddled under the eaves. Joe, when asked, will think past the kaleidoscopic air, rippling up to the ceiling vent like the world’s smallest oasis, to the bulb of garlic on the counter, and how it began to flower. A dead thing, opening itself into two slim green shoots, purple flowers bristling.

“YUSUF AL-KAYSANI AND NICOLÒ DI GENOVA,” the angels boom as one, each word thunder, and Nicky’s eardrums pop. Outside, all the sheep have begun to bleat, scraping their horns along the stone walls of the house. “WE ARRIVE TONIGHT WITH A MESSAGE—" but it’s agony to listen. Nicky and Joe were in San Francisco during the 1906 earthquake and ensuing fire, people screaming as buildings collapsed into flame and ash, and this is louder than that.

“AFTER CENTURIES OF GOOD WORKS, YOU HAVE BEEN CHOSEN TO—” the kitchen’s tile floor cracks.

Joe’s hands are pressed tight over Nicky’s ears, ignoring his own, which are bleeding, trying to muffle the angels’ words. Nicky finds himself is too stunned with dread to move. Perhaps this is it: one of them will be thanked for his efforts and rewarded with passage to heaven, which means that one of them is going to be left alone.

They’re by themselves in the house. Andy and Quynh have been holed up in Reykjavík for the last two weeks as they trail a vacationing tech trillionaire, and Booker and Nile took a forty-five-minute walk to Laugarvatn, a little town on a big blue lake.

Nile had wanted to see the hot springs the town was famous for, and Booker had wanted to keep arguing with her about sandwiches, the inherent superiority of the pâté-cornichon versus Nile’s personal favorite, pastrami on rye. They’ve been gone for hours now, maybe unwilling to trek back through the hail, or maybe still soaking next to each other in the volcanic water, watching the ice pop and hiss as it falls.

It’s difficult to look at the angels directly, like staring at the sun, not the brightness but the radiant pain of it.

“WE HAVE BEEN WAITING MANY YEARS TO CONVEY THIS REWARD. IT IS THUS—”

“Please,” Joe begs, “you’re hurting him.”

The angels pause. “PLEASE EXCUSE US; WE WILL TRY TO REGULATE.” Then, “Yusuf al-Kaysani and Nicolò di Genova, is this better?” Their voices are pitched soft but just as pervasive, like wind skimming through a field of wheat.

The question is not rhetorical; the angels seem to be waiting for a genuine answer.

“It is, thank you,” Nicky manages. There are tracks of blood down either side of Joe’s face, running into his beard, and finally Nicky can move. He touches Joe’s right ear. “Darling,” he whispers, “can you hear me? Does it hurt?”

“I—I’m fine,” Joe says. “Nicolò, I’m all right.”

“We apologize,” the angels say, voices woven together like a whole choir. “It has been a long time since we have spoken to people. We may be out of practice.” They almost sound ashamed. “As mentioned, we have travelled here tonight to bestow a reward. All of us with deep interest have watched you and your family walk the Earth for many years. We have seen you run into war zones to provide aid to the wounded, and tend to the sick and dying when no one else would. You have forgone food and water in famine and drought and instead gave what little you had to those suffering. You have stoked revolution when there was tyranny. You have made art. You have cooked meals. Many, many times over, you witnessed the worst of the world, cruelties as deep as they can go, yet you stayed and helped. Why?”

“Someone had to,” Joe says. “It wouldn’t have been right to, to what, look the other way and pretend it wasn’t happening? No. But that doesn’t make us special,” he says. There is pleading in his voice.

“What does it make you, then?” the angels ask.

“Just long-lived,” Nicky says. His hands are clenched hard into Joe’s sweater, weave of the knit straining under the pressure of his grip. He knows it’s impossible, to hold on like this, that they are helpless to whatever it is the angels want of them, or want to take from them. He keeps his arms around Joe anyway.

“You are both very humble,” the angels say. Their voices sound almost normal now, more singular, almost human. As they speak, the angels float on the ceiling like clouds. They are made of hundreds of butterfly wings, opening and closing exactly in sync, then they are made of Nicky’s mother, a face he has not seen for a thousand years, smiling down at him, and then they are Joe’s three sisters, whom Nicky never met but has seen many times in Joe’s sketchbooks. He blinks, and the angels are a flock of extinct birds, then a hovering oval pool of water threaded with silvery fish, then an entire forest in miniature, root system shaking dirt onto the cracked kitchen floor below.

“You have known each other for a thousand years, and it is almost the turn of the century again,” the angels tell them. “Ninety-nine years and a month into the new millennium, and islands and coastlines are sinking into the sea. Families are stranded in refugee camps, children are bloated from malnutrition, forests are burning, and the rich luxuriate in their opulent homes as they make plans to colonize distant planets. A billion people died this year, most of them too soon. My friends,” the angels say, “the planet is dying.”

“Take Yusuf,” Nicky bursts out.

Joe looks at him askance as the angels buzz against the ceiling in confusion. A den of sleeping foxes become fresh figs like dark little jewels become Joe and Nicky themselves, twined together in bed, Joe’s arm draped protectively over Nicky’s chest, his hand over Nicky’s heart.

“No,” Joe says next to him. He’s staring at Nicky, the fear obvious in his eyes. “I won’t leave you, and you won’t ask me to.”

“You shouldn’t have to be alone,” Nicky begs him, and watches the betrayal rise on Joe’s face.

“You think I’d agree to abandon you?” Joe demands. “You heard them: everything is dying, and you really think, after all this time, I could leave you behind to mourn me as the world ends? I won’t,” he says. “Take Nicolò,” he tells the angels, although his voice breaks as he says it.

The angels hum, odd and rattling, a sound like a million marbles rolling across a vast wooden floor, then say, “Forgive us; we do not often speak with words and may have been unclear. To ease your distress: we do not mean to separate you from one another or take one of you away.”

“Our family needs us still,” Joe insists. “We can still do some good in this world. Please.”

“Yes,” the angels agree. “Exactly. And so our gift to you is thus: we are going to give you a child.”

Next to him, Joe goes perfectly still. Nicky, very badly, wants to touch him, and reaches over and takes his husband’s hand. Under Nicky’s palm, Joe is beginning to tremble, or Nicky is; he can’t tell who. The tremor intensifies between their hands, feeling almost alive. A child.

“How—um,” Nicky clears his throat and thinks of the refugee camps he and Joe have spent time in over the years, boys kicking balls back and forth behind fences, girls sitting in circles and making up stories. “An orphan,” he says.

“No,” the angels say. “Not yet. This child will be of your own flesh and blood. You and Yusuf, together. The rescuer of this world. A balm against corruption, a remedy for sorrow. A love letter to what is left, and what can still be.”

“But we’re—we can’t,” Joe says. The tremor has spread from his hand, up his arm, and into his voice. “We’re both—we would need someone else who could, a woman.”

Nicky can tell that Joe is thinking of their family, of Andy, Quynh, and Nile. Andy and Quynh are slowly aging together and both hit menopause decades ago, which leaves Nile. Nausea swells up. Nile, who once broke into a museum to leave Andy’s Rodin there so that it could be preserved, who sometimes still talks to her mother and brother in her sleep, who convinced Booker to take salsa-dancing classes the last time they were all in Los Angeles, Nile laughing as Booker spun her around, a smile breaking out over his face.

To draw Nile, their little sister, into this, to demand that she donate her body to give them a biological child would be coercive, exploitative, and despicable, rescuer of the world be damned. He can’t. Nicky looks at Joe and sees the same thing written on his face. They won’t.

“We’re gay,” Joe tells the angels.

“And may your union be forever blessed,” reply the angels.

“So we can’t,” says Joe. It’s the pain of an old wound, one Nicky shares; even in the past, when it wasn’t openly done, they always wanted children. “We don’t have the—our bodies won’t work like that. And,” he meets Nicky’s eye, “we don’t have anyone to ask.”

It is probably foolish to lie to angels. Nicky does it anyway. “We really don’t,” he says.

“We often communicate through visions,” the angels say. “It is preferable, sometimes, for language is a jagged, ever-changing thing. May we show you?”

Nicky and Joe are still holding hands, arms between them pressed tightly together. With his free hand, Nicky reaches for Joe’s wrist, and Joe holds him tightly. Joe’s palm is cold and slick with sweat, while Nicky feels overheated, almost dizzy. He looks at Joe and gives a minute nod.

“If you think it would be best,” Joe says, “then yes, please show us.”

The angels let out a low, moaning roar, and they are a pinkly glistening mass of beating human hearts, then the giant face of a sunflower, each seed an opening eye, then the faces of Nicky and Joe’s fathers, breaking to pieces like a smashed vase, then—

Nicky and Joe are no longer in Iceland. They are in a small room in the countryside somewhere, the wide window above the bed open to peaks of night-black hills and blooming jasmine outside. They have just woken up from sleep. Nicky’s eyes are scratchy with it, and the details of the room are soft and vague, shapes of furniture bleeding like watercolor into the darkness. Joe is a warm, reassuring presence behind him, and also awake. He kisses the nape of Nicky’s neck and calls him My Moon, then pulls Nicky back snug against his body, proprietary. His chest hair tickles along Nicky’s spine, and he’s half-hard against the back of Nicky’s thigh, a luxurious heat to him. Nicky tips his head back, to smell him, his shampoo and sweat.

In their many beds in their many safehouses across the world, Nicky has always loved these middle-of-the-nights, the slow rise and fall of Joe’s breath behind him, blankets tangled between their legs. If Nicky turned to look at him right now, Joe’s face would be gentle, mouth soft, hair crazy, eyes maybe closed if he’s pretending to sleep. In these moments, depending on Joe’s mood, if Nicky tries to talk to him, Joe will pretend to snore, gargling and exaggerated, into Nicky’s hair.

“Joe,” he murmurs, testing, lightly braced for Joe’s snoring routine. “My dear one.”

Instead of feigning sleep, Joe does what he sometimes likes to on nights like this, and presses his palm over Nicky’s heart to feel the steady rhythm of its beat. Nicky shifts back against him, restless and wanting to be closer, and feels Joe laugh against the back of his neck. His hand leaves Nicky’s chest and trails down, over the round swell of his stomach, cups it, then begins to trace slow shapes over Nicky’s bare skin. Perhaps he is drawing something.

“Don’t tease me, my heart,” Nicky whines, and tries to reach to move Joe’s hand lower. “Don’t be so cruel when I need you, not right now.”

“You need me, huh,” Joe says, and Nicky can feel the smile.

“Now and always,” he says with a total sincerity that he would have been ashamed of before his first death. “I want—,” but he stops at the sudden flutters of movement. “Joe.”

Joe tenses behind him. “Nicolò, what is it? Are you—does something hurt?”

“Feel,” is all Nicky offers, then pushes Joe’s hand flat against his stomach. Joe feels what Nicky does and inhales once, quick and sharp.

They stay like that for a few minutes, Joe’s hand pressed to Nicky’s stomach as their baby kicks, then Joe says, in wonder, a two-word prayer: “Our child.”

—Then they are back in Iceland, both of their faces wet with tears. Joe, shaking with adrenaline, looks at Nicky, then touches the flat, familiar plane of his stomach. Nicky lets him. He can’t quite speak. Then Joe leans in and presses his face into Nicky’s neck, his breathing rough. Nicky’s arms go around him automatically, holding. He can still feel the phantom sensation of it, swoops and tumbles, and a crevice of grief opens inside his chest. He wants to be back in the room with the jasmine outside, Joe drawing pictures through his skin as their baby wakes up.

On the ceiling, the angels take the shape of the solar system, bright little ringed planets of fire and gas and ice, tiny moons circling, and then hold the form, shivering.

“We hope that the dream provided clarity,” the angels say, and their voice is plainspoken and unremarkable, except they are speaking in Nicky’s first language, in an exact replica of his mother’s accent.

Again, the angels seem to want an answer, some confirmation that Nicky and Joe now understand what their reward is to be.

“It helped, thank you,” Nicky says. “But why us? There are billions of people alive right now, half of them women. Why—why me?”

“You do not want the gift.” The angels sound deeply sad. One of the planets cracks like an egg, spilling a strange, midnight blue yolk.

“That’s not what—I _do_ want it,” he says, and Joe makes a small, shocked noise against Nicky’s throat, then pulls back to look at him. The expression on his face is the same as it is when Nicky wakes up from the dead, fear and joy and relief all mixed together.

“Nicolò,” Joe says, “sweetheart, are you sure?” His hand still rests on Nicky’s stomach, just beneath his navel, a tender, wanting pressure.

“Please let me,” Nicky says, and his voice cracks too, like the planet. “I love you,” he says.

“I love you, I love you,” Joe says, twice, an echo.

The angels’ broken planet has reformed, and the blue yolk of its interior is now a new planet, spinning with the rest, and accumulating snowdrops of moons.

“Have you decided?” the angels ask. “Will you accept our gift? Will you give unto the world a child who will grow up to save it?”

Joe cuts his eyes over to Nicky, then holds his gaze. He looks terrified and also like he wants to laugh. Nicky squeezes his hand.

“We have,” Joe says. “Yes, we’ll do it.”

“You will raise a miracle,” the angels say, now in Joe’s first language. “It was nice to talk to you both.”

One by one, like soap bubbles, the planets pop and vanish, until just the new one and its moons remain. The angels are leaving.

“Wait,” Nicky says, and the little planet does, vibrating as its moons snap out of existence. “Will the child be like us? Long-lived?”

“You will be good parents,” the angels say, in Icelandic this time, and the blue planet bursts into light.


	2. Nile

The hail stops just after 10 p.m., leaving the night clear and glasslike. The streetlights end half a mile out of the little town, pitched rooftops receding as Nile and Booker walk down the middle of the empty highway, past the final pool of light, and into near-total blackness.

The night is so immediately dark that it’s disorienting, like stumbling into another room. A current of wind slopes down the mountains from the northwest and rushes fast over the open fields to meet them, icy and ripping at their clothes, then rolls on toward farmland.

The hair on the back of Nile’s neck is still wet, and she pauses, shivering, as she waits for her eyes to adjust. Next to her Booker hesitates, then touches the back of her arm, as if to steady her. He might think she is afraid or sad, instead of only cold.

//

In town, hearing Nile’s American accent, the owners of the geothermal baths spoke to her with sympathy about the civil wars and upheavals of the past thirty years, the bombings up and down the East Coast, and the destruction of New York City, which they had never visited but loved to see in old movies, they said. Central Park looked beautiful when it still existed, the kind of place you wanted to spend an afternoon, shopping bags at your feet while you drank coffee under the trees.

They thought, Nile realized halfway into the conversation, that she was a refugee.

“I’m actually from Chicago,” she told them, a city still relatively intact, its population more than tripled now and spilling into the surrounding suburbs with New Yorkers, Virginians, and Floridians whose homes had been ripped away by violence and floodwaters.

“Chicago!” the owners said. “We love _The Blues Brothers,”_ then Booker caught Nile’s eye and raised his eyebrows toward the hot springs, and away they went.

He had been gentle with her all day.

“I’m fine,” she snapped at him an hour into their soak. It was late in the year, the mountain roads closed for the winter, and they were the only people in the blue waters of the baths, steam rising between them. Nile’s body felt buoyant in the water in a way that scared her, like she was suddenly about to float up into the clouded air. She leaned back hard against the wooden edge of the pool, wanting solidity.

“I know you’re fine,” Booker said. “I just like being with you,” and through the steam, he smiled at her, a quick, nervous expression that didn’t reach his eyes.

Nile liked his eyes, how they narrowed slyly when she made him laugh. One of her favorite ways to elicit this reaction was by putting on an outrageously bad French accent, one that she had been honing now for more than 50 years.

He would look at her sometimes and seem to sense it in her eyes, and already he’d be laughing, almost helplessly, his hands up like a shield as he said, fake indignation across his face, “Oh, Nile, please, please don’t. Just—"

“ _Oh ho ho!_ ” she would yell over him. “Eef eet eez not my friend, Sébastien! ‘Ow long ‘az eet been? Je vais—ah, ‘ow do you say eet—zee store. Do you want to come?”

“You’re not even doing—that’s just an impression of Hercule Poirot. He’s not even French, he’s Belgian, Nile, for Christ’s sake—"

“Bel-jzon, deed you say? _Sacre bleu!_ ” and they would be off.

In the middle distance, the blue lake caught the dull light of the sun and shone anyway, like a huge, open eye. The sun was meant to set at 4 o’clock today, and it was already 3. She felt mournful about it, but then realized she was overwhelmingly homesick and wanted her mother, who had been dead for 64 years. Her little brother, Kei, lived to 90 and had died a decade ago, but his children and grandchildren and _their_ children still mostly lived in Chicago. Kei and his wife had had twins, a girl and a boy.

Nile had managed to successfully conceal her not-death from her family for five whole years, then cracked and showed up at the hospital while the twins were being born. Upon seeing her again, her mother fainted, spilling coffee across the waiting room floor and scaring the receptionist, a childhood friend of Nile’s mother, who knew she was diabetic and assumed she had fallen into an insulin coma.

When Nile’s mother woke up with her head cradled in Nile’s lap, the receptionist in hysterics behind them, nurses rushing toward them with intravenous fluids, she had wept, tugging Nile’s head down toward herself so that she could kiss her daughter’s face.

Kei did not faint upon seeing Nile, but it was a near thing. He did name his daughter after her, and named his son Julian, after his and Nile’s father.

“I’m sorry the owners assumed that about you,” Booker said to her quietly. He reached out, as if to touch her shoulder, then seemed to remember they were both in bathing suits and stopped, awkward. Nile watched his arm sink back into the water, how it went distorted and wavy under the surface.

“It’s not something to be ashamed of,” she said. It wasn’t, but she was thinking about the month all of them had spent in South Carolina, and how she had found the corpses of three drowned children in a closet. Quynh had been with her, clearing the house, and had gagged next to Nile, at the horror of it, the sight and the smell. Then Quynh had reached down and picked two of the children up, little girls, and Nile had picked up their brother, and she and Quynh walked back through the ruined interior of the house and out into the front yard where the children had once played, the earth still soft with water.

“I know that,” Booker said. “I know. What I mean is, people never assume that about me. And I’m, what I’m sorry about is that they do with you.”

“Because you’re white,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. “And I. I don’t like how they look at you with pity. Like they see you and can only think of suffering. It feels,” he said, and stopped. “It feels so simplifying. Like they try to imagine what kind of person you might be and forget to add the joy.”

She shrugged.

“Because that’s the first thing I think of when I’m with you,” he said. “Joy.”

The hair on Booker’s chest was plastered down, and the steam of the baths had spread a pink blush across his skin. He watched her, watching him, and the blush deepened. A pulse beat hard in his neck. She looked away, back out at the lake. White jets of steam shot skyward from the beach, where people buried jars of bread dough in the sand, to steam and cook in the heat.

Nile had worn long sleeves that day in South Carolina—it had been a wet, humid summer and was the height of mosquito season—but carrying the little boy outside she could still feel the texture of his skin, how the water had made it loose. He had drowned in pajamas patterned with spaceships.

Quynh had not spoken during the car ride home, staring out the window as they drove through the neighborhood of empty houses, Andy’s hand gripping her knee.

Booker had stayed up with Nile that night as she wept into his shoulder, her whole body heaving with sorrow, his arms tight around her.

Death had bloated the boy’s features, but she imagined he had looked like Kei did when he was little, serious-faced and sweet as he and Nile built forts in the living room of their parents’ apartment and borrowed their mother’s nice fountain pen to write long, rambling letters to their father.

_Dear Dad: Today Kei and I went to the playground with Mommy and then we made sweet potato pie because tomorrow’s Thanksgiving and we miss you and we love you and—_

_Dear Dad: Kei and I learned how to do cartwheels today and I’m the best at them and want to do gymnastics and Mommy says maybe I can and Kei says he’s going to learn how to do a BACKFLIP on a SKATEBOARD but Mommy said he has to find a skateboard first, so—_

_Dear Dad: Next week is Christmas and Mommy braided my hair today and I got to pick out the beads to use and I chose blue and green and purple and red and pink and some of the beads are shaped like beautiful stars. Kei says—_

They stayed soaking in the hot springs for three hours, skin wrinkling, as the sun set over the wide blue lake and the steam spiraled up into the high darkness of the night.

Booker suggested they get dinner from the one restaurant in town still open for the winter, and Nile agreed. They sat across from each other in the classroom of an old converted school house next to a window banked by trees, and shared a plate of roasted fish, Booker complaining about the wine, mostly only to draw Nile into conversation. As with the hot springs, they were the only ones in the restaurant, just them and the waitress, a teenage girl who mopped a napkin along the bar and blatantly eavesdropped on their conversation.

//

“I’m okay now,” she says to Booker, and misses him when he nods and drops his hand from her arm. She has the wild impulse to grab his hand and hold it, but puts her hands in her pockets instead. In front of them, the pavement is strewn with hail, and they continue carefully down the road.

“This reminds me of being a kid,” he says, and makes a sweeping gesture with his arm, as if to envelop everything around them, the mountains and the fields, the agricultural ditches and the stars. “When I was young, my father was a mean drunk. A bad one. He’d come home, reeking of vomit, then he’d beat my mother. She’d leave him his supper sometimes, on a covered plate in the kitchen, and once he threw the plate into her face, and broke her nose.”

“I’m sorry,” Nile says, guilty about the glass of wine they each had with dinner, and Booker glances at her, confused.

“What? Ah,” she hears him realize. “Ah, no, Nile, I didn’t mean to—that’s not why I brought it up. I just, I wanted to wait out the hail with you. Inside, where it was warm.”

“We can get tea next time if you want,” Nile says. “I don’t want you to feel like you have to drink if you’d rather not, and, um.”

“I can control myself now,” Booker says, a chill to his voice. “I’ve learned how to, over the years, thank you.”

“Good,” Nile says. Then, “I know. I didn’t mean to imply that you, that you were like him.”

They walk in silence for a minute, another, kicking pieces of hail into the agricultural ditches that run parallel to the road and listening to them splash.

“What I was going to say,” Booker says finally, “is that my mother woke me and my older sister in the middle of the night, and then we all fled Paris. It wasn’t really done, then, for a woman to leave her husband, but my mother did. We travelled for three days to where my grandmother lived in Saint-Amand-de-Coly. She had a little farmhouse, and the nights were absolutely black like this.”

The only pictures Nile has ever seen of Booker are of him at this exact same age, in trenches and airplanes and jungles, and she’s surprised to realize that she can’t imagine him young. She wants to ask him to describe himself, what he looked like then, but to ask now would be to sidestep his story.

“Your mother sounds very brave,” she says.

“She was. You know, when we lived in Paris, I was very afraid of the dark. I’d beg my sister to let me sleep in her bed. But after we left, I wasn’t anymore. Nights like this always felt like freedom. Like anything could happen, and even if it was difficult, it would be good.”

There’s a shadow of an idea, some yearning buried deep in his words, but she doesn’t know how to ask what he means. Instead she says, “Do still you miss her?”

“What?” he seems startled by the question, then skids on a stray piece of hail until Nile grabs his arm.

“When I first died,” Nile says, “I wanted my mom. Most of the people I’ve seen die, the last thing they do is call for their mother.”

They start walking again, her still holding his arm. She doesn’t let go.

Once, embarrassingly, during a firefight in a library in Volgograd, the building had collapsed, trapping Nile under a heavy piece of masonry the size of a sedan. She laid there in agony, pelvis broken, listening to distant gunfire until Joe and Nicky swept in, found her, and heaved the stone off. By that point, she was in and out of consciousness, dust sticking inside her dry throat, and felt only a warm hand on her forehead. “Mom,” she said, “please, Mom,” gritting her teeth as her bones met and healed, but when she opened her eyes, it was Joe, blood spattered across his kind face.

“Yeah,” says Booker. “I do. We always will, I think.” She can tell he’s thinking about his wife and sons.

They’re close to the shepherd’s farm now, and the moonlight has gone peculiar and luminous. Sheep dot the fields like stars, white coats almost glowing.

“Look!” Booker says, pointing. The lights are on inside the farmhouse, and above it there is a huge green ribbon of light, sinuous and coiling in the sky.

They get to the gravel driveway of the farmhouse and stay there for ten minutes, fifteen, twenty, watching the Northern Lights. Nile doesn’t let go of his arm.

//

Inside, Nicky is balanced on the kitchen counter, scrubbing at an enormous burn mark on the white-washed ceiling, and the basement door has been propped open with a bucket of grout. Joe emerges, a stack of tiles and a trowel beneath one arm, and freezes when he sees Nile and Booker standing in the doorway.

“Look, Nicky,” Joe says, with odd, over-bright cheer. “Booker and Nile are home!”

Nicky stops washing the ceiling, but doesn’t turn around immediately. Instead of greeting them, he just stands there, his whole body tense, heels hanging off the kitchen counter as he stares hard at a crack running up the plaster of the wall.

Joe sets the trowel on top of the bucket of grout, stacks the tiles next to it, then crosses the kitchen to help Nicky down from the counter, a careful hand at his elbow and the small of his back. Nicky leans into him briefly, then straightens.

“Hi Nicky,” says Nile, tentative. “Are you, uh—how was y’all’s evening?” She catches Booker’s eye, but he looks just as lost. Maybe they had a fight?

Nicky turns to look at them, and the expression on his face makes Nile take a step back. His eyes are red, like he’s been crying. He squints at her and Booker, like it’s difficult for him to focus, then Nile notices his pupils, which are two different sizes.

Nile glances at Joe, and his pupils are the same, one a pinpoint and the other blown all the way to the edge of his iris, only a tiny rim of brown left.

“What happened?” Booker asks Joe, urgent. “Were the two of you attacked? Do we—should we leave?”

“We had a,” Joe pauses, dazed like he’s just taken a blow to the head. Maybe he has. “We had a cooking accident.”

“Were either of you hurt?” Booker says. “In this cooking accident?”

Above Joe the ceiling is smeared gray where Nicky had been scrubbing at it. The stain catches the light weirdly, glinting all over as if embedded with mica.

Nile checks her phone, looking for missed emergency SOS messages or calls, but the last text Joe sent her is from yesterday, a link to a Khalil Gibran poem they’d talked about over lunch. She thumbs to Nicky’s name, whose last text is from a week ago: a picture of two tabby kittens on a seesaw with the gleeful caption, LIFE IS A BALANCING CAT.

She looks at Booker and he nods, and between the two of them they strong-arm Joe and Nicky into the sitting room off the kitchen and leave them together on the couch.

“I’m making you tea,” Booker says to them loudly. Then hisses at Nile, “Call Andy, now.”

“I don’t want tea,” Nicky says, petulant.

“Great,” Booker says, filling the kettle.

“There’s mutton stew,” calls Joe, “if you want some.”

“The mutton stew from the cooking accident?” Booker asks, incredulous, ducked into a cabinet as he searches for the box of oolong tea that Nile pilfered from Quynh’s suitcase before she and Andy left for Reykjavík.

“Don’t call Andy, Nile.”

Nile fumbles and almost drops her phone. Nicky is in the doorway, directly behind her. “It’s just,” she says. “You guys don’t seem okay.”

“We’re fine,” Nicky says, then glances back at Joe to share a complicated look. “We just had a little scare.” He sounds tired, but more normal now. “I was boiling potatoes for dinner, and Joe and I, we got distracted.” He ducks his head. “And when we came back, all the water had boiled away, and the potatoes were on fire.”

“There was smoke everywhere,” adds Joe from the couch. “Flames up to the ceiling.”

As soon as he mentions smoke, Nile can smell it, but it doesn’t smell like burnt food, it smells sweet, like they burned incense.

“Nicky tried to get the pot off the stove and burnt himself, then I tried to help Nicky and dropped the pot on the floor,” Joe says. “It was like a, do you know what a Rube Goldberg machine is? We accidentally built the most elaborate way in the world to get concussed: potatoes to fire to pot to tile to bashing our heads together as we both reached down to pick it up.”—Nicky laughs—"Really, Nile,” Joe says, “we’re fine.”

All three of them jump as the kettle whistles from the stove.

“Nile,” Booker says, “will you come over here and help me with these?” Next to him there are four mugs on the counter. “You,” he says to Nicky, “get back in the sitting room and go tend your brain-damaged husband.”

Booker and Nicky watch each other for a long moment, then Nicky says, “We made the stew again, after the fire. Really, if you’re hungry, you should have some. It’s very good,” and then he leaves. Nile can hear the faint sounds of Joe and Nicky talking to each other in a language that neither she nor Booker know.

“Sooo they’re definitely lying to us,” she whispers to Booker as he pours the water.

“Oh, for sure,” he says. “I just can’t figure out about which part.”

“You think it’s just that they’re sheepish about hooking up halfway through dinner and letting it burn?” she asks. “Like maybe that’s all there is to it?”

“No,” Booker says immediately. “I once posed as a sixth-form teacher and walked in on them fucking on my desk. On top of essays I still had to grade. So, no, I do not believe that that is it.”

Nile repeats in her head: _So, non, Ah do not believe zat zat eez eet._ She smiles to herself, and Booker tilts his head at her, suspicious.

The stew does smell good.

“Do you think that, if I eat some of it, I’ll fall over dead?” she whispers.

“If you do,” he whispers back, “I’ll keep your corpse company until you resurrect.”

They have some stew. It is almost overpoweringly delicious, perfectly seasoned, savory and warm, and tastes like home. At the very first bite, Nile’s homesickness fades, any sadness smoothed away, and she feels a contentment so profound that tears spring to her eyes. She looks over at Booker, eating and also crying, and takes his free hand. He interlaces their fingers.

They each eat two bowls, and share between them a third.

After eating, they go to the sitting room to check on Joe and Nicky. The television is on, an old Italian movie projected into the air, ghostly little three-dimensional figures dancing with each other, men and women. Joe and Nicky are both asleep, clinging to one another, Joe stretched along the back of the couch and Nicky in front of him, Joe’s arm draped across Nicky’s body so that his right hand tucks under Nicky’s left hip.

Nile looks over at Booker, whose gaze is on the movie projections, tiny men lifting tiny women into the air as tinny music plays. She lets herself imagine, just for a moment, what it would be like to be held by him like that, then she leans forward to gently shake Joe and Nicky awake.

They look up at her blearily, which is normal for Joe, a deep sleeper, but unusual for Nicky, who usually jerks out of sleep into perfect wakefulness. There are deep circles under his eyes, which are still swollen.

“Hey,” Nile says, soft, “we just wanted to check one last time that you all are okay.”

“We’re good,” Nicky says. He looks back at Joe, who smiles at him sleepily, then says, “Thank you for the tea.”

“Where’d you get the recipe for the stew?” Booker asks. “I’ve never had anything like it before.”

“It’s an old Icelandic dish,” Joe says, eyes closed, his face buried in Nicky’s hair. “Nicky and I once saved a yarn shop in Akureyri from stampeding wild horses and the owner gave us her family recipe in gratitude.”

“Uh huh, great,” Booker says. “What’s in it?”

“Divinity,” murmurs Nicky.

“Lots of garlic,” says Joe.

“Good night,” says Nile.


	3. Joe

Joe wakes up from a fading dream about his parents just before 6 a.m., and finds that he and Nicky fell asleep in their clothes last night, on top of the sheets. For a man sleeping in bell-bottom jeans—en route to Iceland, there had been an unfortunate misunderstanding with a group of puffin-hunting Russian oligarchs in the Faroe Islands, and there were only so many thrift stores in Tórshavn—Nicky looks serene, hair rumpled against the pillow, his hands loosely curled on the quilt.

When Joe kisses his temple, Nicky makes a small noise of complaint and reaches for him, mumbling in Italian something like, _No, stay here with me_ , then begins to snore.

Joe walks silently into the kitchen, and by the light of his phone discovers that the burn mark on the ceiling is gone, and that the tiles are no longer cracked. Curious, he goes to the sink and turns the cold-water tap, which had been broken when they arrived several weeks ago, and a jet of clean, pure water flows from the faucet and into his glass. He drinks it, listening at the bottom of the stairs for any noise from Booker or Nile’s bedrooms, but all around him, the house is silent.

He finishes the water, then walks into the sitting room to pray, facing Mecca, and also the shepherd’s rock collection, arranged on a repurposed spice rack on the wall. Upon closer inspection, all the rocks have been transformed into glittering geodes. He sighs.

On the kitchen table there is a notepad in the shape of a horse, probably left behind by Andy. He scribbles a quick note on top: _Went to get provisions for the trip! Nicolò, shining treasure of my soul, you are the breath in my lungs and the light in my eyes, and the finest details of you, from the song of your laugh to the beauty mark on your cheek, have enchanted me for a thousand years and will for a thousand more, my heart, my life, my husband. I love you. Nile, as Gertrude Stein once wrote a poem about Pablo Picasso, and he, in turn, painted a portrait of her, so too does our friendship bloom throughout these many lucky years, periodt._ He savors writing that word, imagining her groan upon reading it, then adds, _Booker, please take out the recycling. XOXO, Joe_

Outside, the meadows that surround the farmhouse are opaque with blackness, which is a good thing; sunrise today isn’t until almost 11. They’ll have more than enough time to drive from Laugarvatn to Reykjavík to rendezvous with Andy and Quynh.

Before he gets in the car, Joe double-checks all the locks of the farmhouse, then presses an ear to the door one last time, listening for any signs of stirring inside. There is nothing.

Satisfied, he slides into the driver’s seat, switches on the music—an ancient Enya song begins to play, Quynh’s fault—then rests his head against the steering wheel and has a panic attack.

//

Last night, after the angels had departed, the sheer magnitude of what was being asked of them, the supreme life-and-death stakes that their child held for the entire future of the planet and the whole of humanity, hit them both in different ways.

The first thing Joe felt was a kind of orchestral joy, notes unfolding behind his breastbone until all of him felt like music. He laughed, elation crescendoing, and grabbed Nicky by the waist to spin him around the kitchen, hail still bouncing off the roof above. Nicky’s hands came to Joe’s shoulders, stunned awe across on his face.

//

For a very long time, they had all stood together, their little band of soldiers, and watched the world grow steadily worse. He and Nicky had spent the first fifteen years of the AIDS epidemic between hospitals and university classrooms, sitting at the bedsides of the sick and dying as they pursued medical degrees. Even at the time, their efforts had felt largely useless; hundreds of people died every day, and it was one thing to be able to identify a Kaposi sarcoma on a young woman’s cheek, and something else entirely to be able to do anything about it.

And there had been so many men like them. Young and old, cooks and artists and writers and busboys and runaways, who called each other husband, who had determinedly loved each other for years in a world that did not love them back.

In 1993, he had spent a period of three months tending to a dying 17-year-old girl in his and Nicky’s Greenwich Village apartment. She was from Taos, New Mexico, and had hitchhiked to New York three years previous, after her family had disowned her. Before she got sick, she had slept in Port Authority and in subway cars. The A train, she told him, was the best, stretching 31 miles, all the way from Inwood in Manhattan to Far Rockaway in Queens. She liked falling asleep knowing that she would wake up by the beach, she said. Her name was Dawn.

A week before Dawn died, Joe kneeled next to the bathtub in their kitchen and poured cups of warm water over her hair, a towel draped over her body for modesty. He cupped the back of her head as he worked, helping her sit up, and her skull felt fragile, like a bird’s egg. Usually, Nicky did this, but he was at a march today, shielding protesters from police with his body. By the stove, the radio switched from Whitney Houston to The Proclaimers. As Joe rinsed the last of the shampoo from her hair, Dawn closed her eyes.

“You know why I chose New York?” she said. “Of all the places I could’ve gone?”

“Why’s that?” Joe asked. Outside, an ambulance siren zipped by, and there was the sound of a window shutting.

“I wanted to be a playwright,” she said, almost bashful.

“I think you’d be wonderful at it,” Joe said, and meant it.

Dawn tipped her head back in his hand and looked at him. She had wide, brown eyes. “I miss my mom,” she said, and her face crumpled. Her hand gripped Joe’s arm, and he leaned to hug her, bathwater soaking into his shirtsleeves.

“I’m here, I’m here, I’m here,” he said into the part of her hair, because it was all he could say, but it wasn’t what she wanted, and it wasn’t enough. He felt an unshakable, helpless fury, which until then he had only experienced in wars. With this fury came a kind of spiritual desolation, a creeping exhaustion that tore the soul. There was a child dying in his kitchen, whose family had thrown her away. Where was God for her?

//

They had stopped whirling around the kitchen and stood against each other now, rocking in little steps side to side, like they were dancing.

Joe thought about Dawn, who had become like a daughter to them in the months they took care of her. Two weeks into living with them, she had stolen Joe’s wallet and leather jacket, gone missing for a frantic twenty-four hours, then showed up just after midnight, shame-faced, with a stack of new cassette tapes in her pockets. Nicky had grounded her on principle, sent her to bed, then puzzled over the instructions on the back of a box of instant macaroni-and-cheese as he made her dinner.

They had known her death was coming, but it destroyed them anyway. No one from her family claimed her body, so they did, Joe affecting an American accent to pretend to be her brother, and together they collected her ashes from a crematorium in Chelsea. They intended to walk home, back to their apartment, but only got as far as Union Square Park before Joe couldn’t go any further. His knees gave, and Nicky directed them both onto a bench, and together they gazed down at the little paper-wrapped box of their daughter on Joe’s lap.

There was horror in the idea of bringing a child into a dying world, but the word the angels had used was “rescuer.” A balm against sorrow. A miracle. Heads of state threatened annihilation as sea levels rose and the atmosphere turned feverish. He and Nicky had thrown themselves against the worst of the world for centuries, eroding like seashells into sand, and somehow, bizarrely, the higher powers had noticed.

When the angels first appeared to them, Nicky had gripped Joe tight enough that his ribs creaked, then begged, eyes wild, “Take Yusuf!” Fear had spread itself sickly through Joe’s body. A poem by the fourteenth century Persian poet, Hafez, had wound through Joe’s mind: “Out / Of a great need / We are all holding hands / And climbing. / Not letting go. / Listen, / The terrain around here / Is / Far too / Dangerous / For / That.”

“Are you scared?” Nicky asked into Joe’s sweater. He was crying, tears slipping down his wonderful, beaky nose. Joe touched a hand to Nicky’s cheek, then used his thumb to wipe beneath Nicky’s eyes.

“Hayati,” Joe said, “of course I am. I’m fucking terrified.”

“But you still want to do it,” Nicky said. He sniffed. “Oh, Joe, stop, I’m fine,” when Joe reached up with his sleeve to blot under Nicky’s nose. “I’m just—you know when I start it’s hard for me to stop.”

This was true. Joe welled up when Andy showed them pictures of her and Quynh in matching sunhats in Hanoi, but Nicky could go years without crying. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel things as deeply as Joe; he just went quiet with it, sadness sinking into him like stones through water. He had wept for hours that day in the park with Dawn’s ashes between them, his head in his hands. In the rare times Nicky cried, it tended to last, and broke Joe’s heart to see.

“There is not a single thing I want more in this world than this child with you,” Joe said, and pulled Nicky’s face against his neck, rubbing his scalp. “It’s okay to cry, you know. Now you can catch up with me.”

“I could never watch enough sad animal shelter commercials to catch up with you,” Nicky said, and he smiled very slightly.

“You cried during _Stalker_ ,” Joe pointed out.

“ _Andy_ cried during _Stalker_ ,” Nicky said. “Tarkovsky knew what he was doing. Their journey through the Zone? Get out of here with that,” which was a phrase of Nile’s that he liked. Then he said, “What if—what it doesn’t work? Or this was just an, I don’t know, a shared hallucination?”

Together, they looked up at the burn mark on the ceiling.

“Stop it,” said Joe softly. The question scared him. All of this was real. It had to be. “You know what we saw.” He felt suddenly dizzy, and sank down into a chair.

“My love,” Nicky said, “are you all right?”

Joe blinked, then Nicky was in front of him, concern all over his wet face. Behind him, the room swam. “I’m fine,” Joe said. “It’s just—my eyes.”

“Let me see,” Nicky said, and Joe opened his eyes wide and stared up at him. As Nicky looked, his own pupils dilated and shrunk and dilated again. “I think it’s like looking at the sun,” Nicky said, wincing.

“What?” Joe shut his eyes against sudden vertigo and leaned his head forward. Nicky’s hands caught and held him, palms cool and dry against Joe’s forehead. Joe swallowed. He felt almost drunk.

“That’s what it felt like to me, seeing them,” Nicky said, then bent to kiss the top of Joe’s head. “You know, I feel very foolish.”

“How do you mean?”

“I used to be a priest. Angels appeared to us after a thousand years of life, and I didn’t even think to ask them anything about God.”

Joe slit an eye open, and the room spun, like they were on the pitching deck of a ship. He shut his eyes again. “What would you have asked them?”

“I don’t know.” Nicky sounded thoughtful. “Where we go when we die. Why we always come back. Why Nile hasn’t noticed yet that Booker has been in love with her for years.”

Joe laughed against Nicky’s hands, but then stilled. He sat up, the kitchen shifting queasily around him, and then said, “Nicolò, I’ve just had a thought. I’m going to tell you, but I need you not to panic.” He paused. “How do we know, um, that it hasn’t already happened?”

“ _Mi scusi?_ ” Nicky said, voice rising an octave.

“I mean the Virgin Mary,” Joe said.

“But I’m not a virgin,” Nicky said, exasperated. “We just had sex yesterday,” and then stopped, horrified, his hands over his mouth. “You don’t think,” he muttered, then trailed off. “You really don’t think—"

“We should check,” Joe said. “We’re meeting up with Andy and Quynh tomorrow, and we don’t know how any of this works. If the mission goes to shit and you’re hurt, and you’re already—and you—“ He couldn’t even make himself say it. “I couldn’t stand it,” he said instead, and pulled Nicky close. Nicky stepped obligingly into the vee of Joe’s legs, and Joe pressed his face against Nicky’s stomach. His head throbbed.

Nicky’s hand slid down the back of Joe’s sweater, and began to scratch his back, soothing. “It might be too early,” he said. “Even if I am.”

“Just in case it’s not,” Joe said. “Please.”

//

It’s a thirty-seven-minute drive from Laugarvatn to Selfoss, a little town of white houses with colorful rooftops by a river. Joe arrives in the parking lot of Bónus just after 7 a.m. and parks beneath its awful pink pig logo. He allows himself to hyperventilate to “Orinoco Flow” for five more minutes, then powerwalks through the automatic doors to beeline for the pregnancy tests.

He chooses three at random, then tries to disguise the obvious purpose of his shopping trip by concealing the tests under a mountain of snack food. He finds a box of skúffukökur for Nile, chocolate cake enticing under its frosting and coconut, and throws in a handful of the wretched salty black licorice candy that Booker loves. For Nicky and himself, he adds skyr.

Even before he and Nicky fell in love, they discovered a shared fondness for tart things, returning from markets with kumquats so sour that three or four numbed the tip of the tongue. Joe has been known to choose limes as a snack, and many times has walked in on Nicky eating kimchi straight out of the jar with orange-stained figures. More than 300 years ago, in the middle of a famine, a Moroccan citrus farmer had gifted them a single ripe tangerine. Joe can still remember the way Nicky’s eyes lit up with pleasure as he bit into the first segment, how he sucked away the juice that ran down his arm.

When he checks out, the cashier smiles at him knowingly, and he feels absurdly like he’s just been caught doing something he shouldn’t. She bags the pregnancy tests with the rest of the food. He pays, then as he reaches to pick up the bag, she touches his wrist.

Startled, he looks at her.

She nods toward the bag. “Good luck,” she says.

//

When they arrive in Reykjavík just after 10 a.m., Quynh is eating a hot dog on the front steps of the safehouse as the sun begins its pink climb over Faxaflói Bay. She’s wearing an old bomber jacket of Andy’s and a pair of yoga pants, and she looks good, relaxed, even. There’s more gray than black in her hair now, and since Joe last saw her a month ago, she’s cut it just above her shoulders. Joe raises a hand in greeting, and she gravely tips an invisible hat to them as he parks the car.

In the passenger seat, Nicky is absorbed in a battered old Italo Calvino book, _The Nonexistent Knight_. Joe’s read it too, and a line comes to mind: “The war will last for centuries, and nobody will win or lose; we’ll all sit here face to face forever. Without one or the other there’d be nothing, and yet both we and they have forgotten by now why we’re fighting.”

The pregnancy tests, yet untaken, sit at the bottom of the shopping bag by Nicky’s feet. Joe considers himself to be a safe driver, having secretly taken a half-dozen defensive driving courses since Andy became semi-mortal 80 years ago, but throughout the mossy, boulder-laden trip from Laugarvatn, he kept having to stop himself from reaching down to check that the tests were still there. They were only a mundane, early morning purchase from a supermarket, just little bits of paper and plastic, but they were also proof that his life was about to change, because, now or soon, Nicky would need them.

Nicky, huddled in his favorite of Joe’s hoodies, had read the entire way.

Joe glances in the rearview mirror. Nile dozes against the window, earbuds in, but Booker is already beaming at Quynh, goofy and young-looking. Quynh grins back with all her teeth, finishes her hot dog, then slopes over to wrestle Booker out of the car and hug him.

//

During what they called Quynh’s homecoming, and Booker’s Ecoterrorist Apology Tour, Quynh and Booker had teamed up for a brief but extremely memorable decade to save the whales as aggressively as possible.

Quynh and Booker told the story one night last year, to pass the time as all of them scaled the neoclassical architecture of Buckingham Palace. It had been June, and the air was sticky with rain that threatened to fall. When they reached the roof and settled into their stakeout, Andy dug through her backpack and produced a pouch of carrot and hazelnut Turkish delights that she had picked up at Borough Market earlier that day. Nicky, who had accompanied her, opened his own bag to reveal a burnished loaf of sourdough, and an oozing wedge of Brillat-Savarin cheese. They passed these around as Quynh began to speak.

The whales had saved her from completely losing her mind, she told them, peering through her binoculars down into the manicured gardens below. They had heard what little noise she could make, just the beating of fists against metal, and come to see what she was. And then—she never figured out why—they had stayed, seemingly only to be near her. Over her centuries of imprisonment, entire pods shifted their migration patterns, until she saw whales whenever she woke up from death, their songs ringing through the iron maiden like a tuning fork.

And as Quynh suffered, so did they. Their numbers plummeted over the years, pods smaller, calves orphaned, matriarchs gone. They were being hunted, wounded, torn apart from each other, just like she had from them.

When the heavy door finally broke open against her hands, and she swam up from the crushing pressure of deep water to take her first breath in the middle of the Atlantic, she already knew what she had to do. She caught a ride on a passing research boat, then went directly to find Booker in Paris.

(“Hang on,” Nile said. “These scientists, who were presumably in the middle of studying the mating habits of giant squids or whatever, just found you in the middle of the ocean, and were like, ‘Cool! Yes! Come aboard, mystery woman!’?”

“Well, I swam a bit first,” said Quynh, which explained nothing. She selected another Turkish delight, and ate it with relish. Five stories below, the wide green sweep of the palace gardens remained empty. “And I told them that I had been swimming, and swept out to sea.”

“No, no, wait,” Booker cut in. “I asked the same thing right when we met, and she didn’t say it like that. It was more like: ‘Thou hast come upon me in mortal coil. Prithee, would thoust lend me your greatest expedience in my liberation from these ghastly waters—‘”

Still chewing, Quynh punched him in the arm, hard. “Anyway,” she said.)

To hear Booker tell it, he just wanted a friend. Quynh broke into his apartment and scared the shit out of him after six months of unrelenting solitude, then demanded that help her save the whales. Drunk, but thrilled to talk to another human being, he had instantly said yes.

They started small. Container ships began to experience an unprecedented number of wreckages, but shipping companies blamed fluctuating ocean currents. _The New Yorker_ ran a series of investigative articles about the recent assassinations of a half-dozen Big Oil executives, from Texas to Qatar. Then the US Navy, whose sonar caused mass whale strandings, lost all of its submarines overnight, and the world broke into chaos.

Within a year, Quynh and Booker had made it to the top of several international Most Wanted lists, and were subject to numerous million-dollar bounties and an award-winning podcast devoted to discerning their possible identities. No one knew who they were. Somehow, almost no security footage of them existed.

When they were not, as Booker liked to put it, “scuba-diving for the greater good,” they were holed up in Paris, watching lesbian arthouse films (Quynh’s choice) in Booker’s apartment, in an effort to help Quynh sound less like an extra in a Shakespeare play. Mostly this had worked, although Booker once confided to Joe that Quynh had thrown his entire television set out a third-floor window during a showing of _Blue Is the Warmest Color_ , snarling that it was pornography made for men. They had watched _But I’m a Cheerleader_ after that.

(“But did you watch _Portrait of a Lady on Fire_?” Andy asked.

“ _Saving Face_ was better, I think,” Quynh said.

“Oh, Alice Wu is a genius,” began Andy, then stopped.

They all went quiet as their targets came into view. Two men in sleek suits, one American and one British, both with political ambitions and from old, influential money. Their careers to this point had been largely parasitical, funneling money into conservative lobbyists and virulent anti-immigrant propaganda. Their meeting tonight was to confirm the next big push: outsourcing mass deportations to privatized border-control corporations. It was quicker this way, the men argued in the press, more humane than dragging out court cases. It also near-guaranteed the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.

The men approached from opposite directions, and shook hands by a bed of tulips. Next to Joe, all of Nicky seemed to sharpen as he gazed through the scope.

“You have the shot, Nicky?” Andy asked, terse. “Remember, aim only to wound. We need them alive. For now.”

“Sì,” he said, and fired twice.

Both men went down in a heap. The radio crackled as Booker relayed this to Copley, and Joe checked the integrity of the grappling hooks one last time before nodding to Nile, as together, they prepared to rappel down the palace walls.

Nile went over first, eyes fierce, silent in her descent. Booker cradled the walkie-talkie against his shoulder as he spoke to their contact, typing rapidly on his phone as they coordinated a mass breakdown of the palace security systems. Andy and Quynh were already gone, having slipped after Nile and through a fifth-floor window to run interference.

Joe crouched on the ledge, next to Nicky, whose scope was still trained on the men, now laying prone in the flowerbeds.

“Yusuf,” Nicky said, and when Joe looked over, Nicky kissed him. Quickly, just the warm press of lips catching, but there was heat in Nicky’s voice when he said, “Come back to me soon, my love.”

Joe, smiling, stepped backwards off the roof to follow Nile down into the night.)

Per the terms of Booker’s exile, he didn’t try to contact the rest of the team, nor they him, and Quynh didn’t suggest that he violate that agreement. Nile still dreamt of Quynh, but still only ever in water. Because Quynh was murdering oil executives on pleasure yachts with harpoon guns.

(“So you were basically a pirate,” Nile said later, men delivered to Copley, as the six of them shared takeaway curries in their safehouse in Camden Town.

Quynh looked as affronted as a person could with a mouthful of garlic naan, and swallowed. “The only thing I ever stole was power from corrupt corporations, so that I could return it to those who deserved it most.” She meant the whales.

“We also definitely commandeered several cruise ships,” added Booker, helping himself to the aloo gobi matar as Quynh waved his comment away.)

In these same ten years, Nile reunited with her family in Chicago and introduced them all around one day during a very awkward lunch. Nile’s mother, Isadora, was a woman with a shrewd gaze and a disarming sense of humor, and Joe found himself desperately wanting her approval. Like him, she was a lifelong painter, and had just retired after forty years of teaching high school studio art. After Nile’s not-death, Isadora had joined a bowling league for war widows, as a distraction.

Andy surprised everyone by asking if she could join the league. Isadora surprised everyone even more by saying yes.

From then on, whenever a mission called them to the United States, Andy made a pitstop in Chicago to bowl with Isadora. Nile often accompanied her, but not always, and Joe asked Andy about it once. It wasn’t that he didn’t approve of the friendship—he liked Isadora, a lot—but he didn’t understand. Of everyone in the world in whom Andy might have made a friend, she had chosen a retired high school teacher who ran church socials and had a rescue Pekingese named Andy Warhol (“They bear a strong passing resemblance.”).

“What do you even _do_ together?” he burst out one night in Nevada as Andy packed to fly into O’Hare the next day, then tried to backpedal as Andy raised her eyebrows at him. “I mean, I’m happy for you, of course, but this is unusual, boss.” By “unusual,” he meant that Andy hadn’t made a friend since Katharine Hepburn, and really, that had been more of a passionate fling. This was something else entirely.

“Bowl,” Andy said. “I dunno. Go to the movies, I guess. Isadora has an allotment in the Community Gardens, and sometimes I help her out there. Or we go to her studio and paint.”

Joe raised his eyebrows back at her, a bit miffed. For decades, he had unsuccessfully campaigned to get Andy to paint with him, and she always said no. He had never even seen her draw anything. “What do you paint?” he asked, but she wouldn’t tell him.

The lines around her eyes had deepened, and the skin of her neck was going loose. He was suddenly afraid he was going to cry, which would only anger her.

But you’re dying, he wanted to yell at her. You’re my family and you’re dying and you won’t tell me this one thing?

Later, in the privacy of Nicky’s arms in their scratchy motel bed, he corrected himself: just aging. He fell asleep that night repeating it like a chant: not dying; only aging.

The next time Andy went to Chicago, a new member had joined the bowling league. Heidi Gagnon-Tremblay was the recent widow of a veteran marine who had taken over his family business, a multinational oil company. After he had been very publicly murdered with a poison dart while waterskiing in Saint-Tropez, Heidi had assumed his role with some trepidation.

The bowling rink was retrofitted inside an Art Deco-style bank, the ceilings arched high and ivory in a way that made every single strike deafening. Andy was in town for a midnight bowl-a-thon, one foot in a bowling shoe, and one in a walking cast after a fall from a high balcony in Guadalajara that made Joe feel sick to recall. The bowl-a-thon was to raise college tuition money for the grandson of one of the league’s members (Andy would go on to pay it in full, anonymously). Nile, Joe, and Nicky had shown up to be supportive.

Nicky, the most practiced sniper in history, was an egregiously terrible bowler, and struck not a single pin. His ball rolled almost noiselessly down the lane and into the gutter, and he turned back to Joe and Nile, gloom and disbelief warring in his eyes.

Nile, a more than passable bowler herself, solemnly suppressed a smile and offered Nicky a tray of nachos as he sat down in their booth in a huff, and Joe stood up to take his turn.

“No,” Nicky said, almost oozing to the floor in self-loathing. “Nachos should be reserved for the anointed few. Clearly I am not among their number.”

One lane over, Floribeth, a retired dental assistant, bowled a perfect Yahtzee. She cheered, and turned to Andy for a high-five. Andy stared at Floribeth just a beat too long, then gave it.

Joe was about to say something like, “Nicolò, treasure of my every dream and waking hour, brightest star of every celestial body that ever was or will be, you knock down the pins of my heart every day, my love—”

A figure in a balaclava and full body armor dropped from the crystal chandelier above them like an enormous, graceful spider. Simultaneously, someone screamed, and someone else bowled a strike, and both echoed throughout the building. The figure rushed Heidi, jabbed her in the neck with a syringe, then darted off into the chilly October night.

Naturally, they gave chase, but with Andy’s broken foot, the assassin maintained a clear lead of at least a block, jumping cars and dodging bikes. The assassin seemed to be searching for something, pausing at each intersection to scan the roads agitatedly, but didn’t seem to find it, and rushed ahead down West Washington Street, shoving past pedestrians.

They caught up with the assassin, or the assassin let herself be caught, in Millennium Park. Andy was limping heavily by then, still weeks away from healing. Each uneven, lurching step hurt to see. They had run past the crowds, all the way to the shore of Lake Michigan, black waves cresting white in the distance. In front of them, the assassin stood ankle-deep in the icy water, then seemed to make a decision, and pulled off the balaclava. Black hair cascaded down.

“Andromache,” came a voice that Joe hadn’t heard in 500 years, and Andy fell forward onto her knees.

(“It was _very_ romantic,” Joe said to Nile, who had stayed behind at the rink that night to guard Isadora and the remaining bowlers. “If you could have seen the way Andy’s eyes shone—”

“ _All right_ , Joe,” Andy snapped, boxing up the leftover takeaway. Quynh kissed her then, soft, on the side of her mouth, and Joe and Nile smirked at them both.

“It was kismet, I think,” said Nicky, dreamy, as he washed dishes. “We only found Quynh in the first place because her getaway driver went missing.”

“I’m right here,” said Booker.)

Booker had sacrificed himself for them, as they later found out. Before her death, Heidi’s company had hired a private security firm, who, after the commotion inside the rink, had been poised to rush inside. Booker met them instead, claimed responsibility for everything, and had been kidnapped. It had been very irritating to retrieve him. All in all, it took three weeks, several deaths between them, and no less than six separate car chases with international law enforcement to rescue him, and even then, after Quynh, the only one of them he seemed happy to see was Nile.

//

Quynh lets Booker go with a smacking kiss to his cheek, then turns to Nile to hug her hello. “You stole my tea,” she says. She looks back at Booker. “And Andy’s shirt.”

Under Booker’s jean jacket he’s wearing an old concert T-shirt printed with the words K.D. LANG AND THE SISS BOOM BANG.

“I brought you more!” Nile says, and rifles through her backpack, coming up with a box and handing it over.

“Andy left it behind!” Booker says. “I’m the one who introduced her to _Even Cowgirls Get the Blues_!”

“Nile,” says Quynh, dark. “This is Celestial Seasonings. I know you are American and therefore I must make certain cultural allowances, but this tea that I hold in my ancient hands is very much Celestial Seasonings.”

“Open it,” Nile says. Next to her, Booker fights a smile.

Quynh does. Inside the box is an elegant little tin of Baozhong tea leaves. Nile must have picked it up the last time they were all in Fuzhou, which means that she planned this moment for months. Booker, judging from the way he’s laughing, probably helped her.

“Tesero,” Joe says, as he unlocks the trunk of the car, “you’ve been quiet this morning. Did you sleep well last night?”

“I had a dream,” Nicky admits.

“I did too,” Joe says. “About my parents. Did you dream of your family too?”

“No,” Nicky says. “I dreamt of Milan. When you came from Amsterdam to meet me there, in 1945.”

//

They hadn’t seen much of each other during the war. None of them had. Booker was in Paris with La Résistance, forging identity documents for Jewish and Romani families in the subbasement of a shuttered hair salon in Le Marais. Andy had been in Germany since Kristallnacht in 1938, smuggling people across the border to her contacts in the Dutch Resistance and coordinating raids on birth registry offices. Nicky was with La Resistenza, joining the anti-fascists in Milan, and, after the Nazi invasion in 1943, acting as a courier between Rome and Genova for Italian and Jewish partisans, sneaking refugees across the Alps into Switzerland, and distributing false documents and aid. Joe began the war as a propagandist in Amsterdam, printing leaflets and secret newspapers in the dead of night, but within a year was an armed resistance member, bombing public records offices and sabotaging railways.

Joe had kissed Nicky goodbye in their safehouse in The Isle of Man in the summer of 1939, and didn’t see him again until the spring of 1945 as Italian partisans liberated Milan. Hitler had committed suicide yesterday, and Mussolini’s corpse hung upside down from an Esso petrol station in Piazzale Loreto. Nicky’s eyes were electric blue from the grand entrance of a bombed-out hotel. The streets were wild with adulation. It was May.

Only half of the hotel’s rooms had been destroyed. They searched until they found one that wasn’t, and went inside. As soon as they shut the door, they were both frenetic with want. It had been six years since they had last seen each other, and desperation made them clumsy. Joe popped a button from Nicky’s shirt as he tore it open. Nicky ripped a seam as he stumbled trying to step out of his trousers.

Joe’s ankle twisted painfully beneath him as Nicky pushed him down to the floor to crawl up his body and take Joe in his mouth. Joe can remember the sounds even now: the roar of liberation outside, and how Nicky had choked.

“Sweetheart, you can be careful,” he said.

“No, let me,” Nicky said, his mouth shining. He moved his hand, and Joe’s hips jerked. “I need this, please, please just let me—”

“Take what you need,” Joe told him, almost astonished, and listened to Nicky’s groan as Joe pushed his fingers into Nicky’s hair.

The bed was covered with plaster that had rained from the ceiling in the bombings, but they made love anyway, Nicky’s heels locked around Joe’s back, his fingers raking down Joe’s sides, hard enough that blood mixed with the plaster. The bed scraped across the floor as Joe thrust into him, Nicky swallowing a scream. They rocked together, the room blurring as Joe’s tears ran down the sides of Nicky’s face.

Surprisingly, the hotel’s plumbing still worked. They drew a bath afterward, Nicky kissing Joe’s twisted ankle, still tingling as the ligaments healed.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t like hurting you.”

“It was only an accident, sweetheart. We tripped.”

“I shoved you,” Nicky insisted, like he wanted to hold onto the shame for a moment longer and examine it.

“To suck me off,” said Joe, and watched the tips of Nicky’s ears turn red. “What do you want, my soul?”

He leaned forward, their knees bumping in the confines of the tub, and kissed just beneath Nicky’s jawbone.

Nicky’s hands found Joe’s, and brought them to his chest. “Touch me here,” he said, then shivered as Joe’s soap-slick fingertips began to flick and tease over his nipples.

“You’re lovely,” Joe said against Nicky’s neck, teeth just grazing skin. He stroked lightly and then harder, working his thumbs over Nicky’s nipples, just to hear the keen rise in his throat. He had made Nicky come just from this before, and it would be wonderful to see again.

“Wait,” Nicky said, writhing against him. “Joe, stop—” Joe did, with great reluctance. “Can you—,” Nicky began. Joe couldn’t resist, and dragged his nails down the inside of Nicky’s thigh, and Nicky’s hips shoved forward. “I want you to fuck me again,” Nicky panted.

“We should get out of the bath, then,” Joe said, and gently bit his earlobe.

“With your hand,” Nicky said.

//

“Nicolò,” Joe whines. “You can’t just tell me you had a sex dream last night about me fisting you and expect me to stay professional in front of our _work colleagues_.”

He’s half-joking, because it’s still difficult to look at that war in the face, and see the fear, loneliness, and terror of those six years. All of them had nightmares for decades, and sometimes even now. Seeing Nicky’s eyes across the crowd that day in Milan felt like waking up from death does: the filaments of the soul lighting back up.

They glance over to the front steps of the safehouse, where Booker is counter-accusing Quynh of stealing his Smartwool socks. They both know this is false; Nile is the true culprit.

Nicky rolls his eyes. “I keep thinking about it,” he says. “I could feel it the next day, you know. Exactly how far you were inside my body. I felt owned by you. It felt like marriage. I loved it.”

“We are married,” Joe says, inanely. They’re standing very close, suitcases forgotten. “We’ve had thirty-three weddings, my love.”

“There are certain things that remind me, though,” Nicky says, and closes the space between them to kiss Joe’s neck. “Fixing you coffee in the morning. Making the bed together. Sharing a tangerine. How, when I eat you out, your body opens so sweetly to my tongue. When you fuck me so well that I’m limping the next day.” The kiss turns into a sucking bite.

Joe is so incredibly glad to have the rental car between them and the rest of their family.

“I had no fucking idea that Italian surrealism got you so hot,” he groans, as Nicky cups him through his trousers. This is a very bad idea. The sun is almost up. The safehouse is on a quiet street, but not a deserted one, and there are sounds of distant traffic.

“Can I blow you tonight?” Nicky says. “I want to feel you come down my throat.” He squeezes, and Joe chokes back a moan. “You always feel so good in my mouth, darling. Will you let me do that, please?”

“Yes,” Joe says, “yes, yes, yes, my husband, my heart—”

“Nicky,” Quynh calls over to them. “Did you get those jeans in Tórshavn?”

In a flash, Nicky’s hands are back on the suitcases. He coughs. “Actually, yes, I did,” he says. “Why?”

“I once had to spend a week in lavender corduroy overalls while Andy and I dismantled a krokodil-smuggling ring in Irkutsk,” Quynh says, and looks pained. “Siberian thrift stores also have a somewhat limited selection,” and then she ushers them inside.

//

This is their newest safehouse, airy and smelling of fresh paint, set up just last year. Paper shades soften the overhead lights, and an unstacked matryoshka sits in six little dolls by a vase of cut flowers in the street-facing window. Boots and sneakers hug the wall by the front door (“I left my wife alone for 500 years, and returned to discover an animal,” Quynh says sometimes when Andy walks in and forgets to unlace). It’s also freezing inside, because every safehouse that Andy and Quynh get to first is.

Joe faintly remembers his grandmother going through menopause, not her face anymore, but the aura of heat around her body. She would get up in the middle of the night to stand in the courtyard outside their home, and he would keep her company, crouched by the jujube trees and digging pictures into the dirt with his fingers. Sometimes she told him stories, about his father, about her own girlhood, but just as often, she was silent. He liked those quiet hours in the nighttime breezes. He remembers the off-center mole on the back of her neck, and how dear it was to him.

When they first arrived in Iceland last month, before Quynh and Andy left for Reykjavík, Joe had woken up shivering just shy of 1 a.m. He got up to adjust the thermostat in the hallway, only to scream when Andy melted out of the darkness, irate and sweating.

He did not touch the thermostat. After everyone else had gone back to bed, assured that there was no attack and that Joe had merely been startled (not embarrassing at all), he opened the freezer and found a leg of lamb encrusted with ice and handed it to Andy, who sat, unhappy and flushed, at the kitchen table.

Wordlessly, she accepted the lamb, using her inner wrists to press the meat to her sternum, the ice already melting into a pool across the kitchen table, as Joe fixed himself hot water, and Andy ice water, and squeezed lemon into both.

She and Quynh are aging, but slowly, grains of years trickling by. The hot flashes have lasted for three decades now, pulling them both out of sleep. When they are not on missions, she and Quynh travel to cold places, Winnipeg and Nuuk and Ulaanbaatar, and open the windows in their bedrooms to coax the winters inside.

Joe’s breath puffs out white. He unbuttons his coat and wraps it around Nicky, encircling him in warmth. Nicky hums, back pressed against Joe’s chest, and Joe can smell the cool mountain air in his hair. Next to them, Booker tugs his hat lower over his ears, and Nile ducks down into the collar of her parka.

The safehouse is three bedrooms, two baths, on the bigger side for them, with a modern kitchen, all clean lines and cabinets without drawer pulls. Six wooden chairs are pulled up to the kitchen table, which holds a bowl of unripe mangos at its center.

From the geothermal greenhouses outside the city, Joe thinks, where there are also banana trees and climbing roses and tomato vines. It’s strange driving by them, these lush, sunny rooms, verdant with life, as the snow falls. They always look lost to him, misplaced from another country.

Andy is in the garden out back, eating breakfast, black bread with butter and olives, and doing the crossword, dangerously, in pen. Like Quynh, she’s cut her hair, buzzed down close to her scalp. When Joe hugs her, it itches against his cheek.

Please don’t die soon, he thinks, as he always does, and spins her around, to listen to her laugh. Please be fine. Please be safe.

Every time he sees her, Andy has a new tattoo. This time it’s a snake, wrapping around her thumb like a ring in intricate, scalloped ink. Since losing her immortality, Andy has paradoxically embraced a new sense of control. She can change her body now, and it will remember.

//

Years ago, after a brutal mission, they went to a night club in Dublin and all got drunk, Nicky and Nile most of all. Andy and Quynh left around midnight, hands tucked companionably into each other’s back pockets, as Nicky pulled Nile up onto the bar to dance. The two of them waved Joe and Booker home just past 3 a.m., Nicky in someone’s heels, Nile with a silk scarf tossed around her neck. They returned together the next day, deeply hungover, with tattoos.

Nile had a Jean-Michel Basquiat crown on her forearm, but Nicky wouldn’t show them his, shrugging off Joe’s curiosity and excusing himself to go shower.

“Is it bad?” Joe mouthed to Nile, who had made distressed expressions at Booker until he sighed and started preparing Eggs Benedict, her favorite hangover food. “Just tell me now, and I promise I won’t get upset.”

Nile slumped back in her chair and steepled her fingers in thought, fixing her gaze on Booker, who was now poaching eggs, to better evade Joe’s every attempt at eye contact.

“Nicky’s is certainly…conspicuous,” she said, examining at her own tattoo. The bold, black lines had already begun to heal and fade.

“Nile,” Joe wailed, “how did my beautiful husband deform himself?”

“Is there hollandaise sauce?” came a frail voice.

They all turned. Nicky stood, freshly showered, in the doorway. A huge tattoo of the Irish flag rippled from shoulder to shoulder.

Nile stared down at her hands, jaw clenched and shoulders shaking, as she furiously tried not to laugh. Booker had no such compunctions; he whooped.

“Heart of my heart,” Joe said, “I know that you, like me, are from a time before the unification of the Italian states, but I did not take you for a traitor to your country.”

Nile snorted into her coffee, then burst into loud, wild laughter, trying to apologize but unable to even get the words out, wheezing, as Booker joined in.

“I was sleepy!” Nicky said. “The parlor was dark, and the orange ink looked red, and I thought, Oh, certainly they will hear me speak and understand from my accent alone—”

“Why is it so big, though?” Booker asked.

“Shoulda just gotten a shamrock on your ankle,” Nile said, and she and Booker burst into peals of laughter again.

//

The tech trillionaire is an extension of their job in London last year. Like the men with their proposal for privatized border-control agencies, he also claims that he has found a solution to the climate refugee crisis.

The trillionaire’s idea is bloodless, and all the more deadly for it: to speed up the rate at which asylum cases are processed. His company has created a program, Haven, that can compare millions of past asylum cases, cross-checking immigration laws, legal precedents, quotas, and likelihood of persecution, and that can decide, within moments, if an individual is worthy of asylum. A dozen different countries have already expressed interest, and governmental contracts are pending.

If Haven says Yes, the asylum-seeker gets to stay. If Haven says No, the asylum-seeker is sent back to their home country, to face floods or wildfires or drought, or forcible recruitment into armies as countries increasingly simmer and crackle with threats of civil war.

The trillionaire says: foreigners arrive, wanting sanctuary, and we are forced to waste our precious few resources on them as the courts decide. Or they try to sneak in, and then we must incarcerate them for months, sometimes years. Why involve the slowness and imperfection of human judgement at all? Better to let impartial software decide in seconds. We’ll take who we want and get rid of the rest.

What the trillionaire does not say: even now, as the world turns hotter, there is still enough room for everyone to be safe. There is clean air, space to build schools, and land to grow food. There are homes in places without chaos. There are carpenters, nurses, doctors, electricians, plumbers, teachers, musicians, cooks, artists, writers, farmers, activists, filmmakers, students, grandparents, mothers, fathers, children on both sides of every border. We will lay foundations. We will plough fields. We will test well water. We will march through tear gas, sound cannons, and rubber bullets in the streets. We will learn how to take care of each other.

The trillionaire, an avid art collector, keeps his seventh home, a modernist castle-like sprawl of a mansion, just outside of Reykjavík. Every few months, he throws extravagant parties to show off his latest acquisitions, drawing a regular circle of friends, business cronies, and xenophobic socialites. Tonight is one such event, and one of Haven’s key investors, a pharmaceutical tycoon, will be in attendance. If they can eliminate this investor, they can slow Haven’s progress for at least another few months, and buy themselves time to plan their next move.

//

They share a pot of Baozhong tea in the garden, shivering, as Andy and Nile talk through the plan for tonight. Nile will pose as a wealthy art curator with jingoistic leanings, accompanied by Booker, in the role of an obscure member of the French aristocracy who has recently come into a fortune. Their goal tonight is to generate a list of future targets, to eventually dry up investments and starve the corporation of money.

While Nile and Booker gather information, Joe and Andy will slip into the party, locate the pharmaceutical tycoon, kidnap, then kill him. October Copley, great-granddaughter of James Copley and their current handler, has arranged it so that, as soon as she receives confirmation of their success, the tycoon will appear to have been called away on an important drug-trial matter, and will be seemingly unreachable for weeks.

This leaves Nicky and Quynh to clear the way for everyone else. They both hold the best advantage at a distance, Nicky, a sniper, and Quynh, an archer, who in recent years has become almost as deft as Nicky on the other side of a scope. The trillionaire’s mansion is all clean, easy sightlines, with huge glass windows that all look into each other. The roofline is blocky, sculptural, and ideal for Quynh to hide and pick off any hired guards who might intrude.

Nicky’s task tonight is at closer range. Like Nile and Booker, he’ll play a character, but in the periphery of the party, as a chauffeur. This will leave him close enough to protect Quynh if things go south, while also allowing him to intervene should Joe and Andy need help. Meaning that it will be Nicky standing between them and any armed guards. If someone fires a gun tonight, Nicky is the one who will likely be hit.

Nicky listens attentively as Nile and Andy talk through the particulars of his role. He’s pulled his hood down, and a cowlick at the crown of his head sticks up. Joe wants to take Nicky’s hand and lead him away from this conversation, take him home, to one of their apartments in Tunis or Madrid, with the tiles Joe hand-painted in the kitchen, and the spoons Nicky carved out of olivewood in the drawers. What if you already are? Joe asked last night, and could feel Nicky’s sudden fear inside his own chest.

If their child is a gift from angels, the will of Allah, then their son or daughter has to live. A miracle should be as certain as the sunrise, which now coats the garden around them in orange light. Something that can’t be taken apart. But how sturdy are miracles anyway, he thinks. How fragile can something be and still be a miracle?

If Nicky already is, then he should switch positions with Quynh, except that would potentially endanger her, which Andy will not tolerate. More than once, Joe has seen Andy fight her way across battlefields, through entire militias, to protect her wife. It is a feeling Joe understands intimately. He would do the same for Nicky, and has. Really, what Nicky should do tonight is stay here at the safehouse. Just in case.

“Joe,” Andy says. “You good?”

“I am,” Joe says.

“Great,” Andy says. “Help me unpack a bit.”

Joe follows warily. The last time he helped Andy unpack, he accidentally discovered Persephone, removing what he thought was a gun magazine from Andy’s duffle bag, only to yelp (manfully) and fling it away from himself.

“Oh, you found Persephone,” Andy said, and stared at Joe until he apologized, picked the dildo up again, and gingerly set it back on the bed.

“Why—why is it called Persephone?” he asked, a mistake.

“Oh, Quynh named it,” Andy said. “Because in Greek myth, Persephone goes down to the Underworld.”

It took a moment for her meaning to land, but when it did, he quickly left the room and joined Nicky outside in the gazebo of the safehouse, to listen to the wild bird calls of Estonia in the spring.

Thankfully, Persephone is not here today, maybe already put away (he does not want to think about it). He joins Andy in one of the bedrooms, to sort first-aid supplies.

“You seemed distracted outside,” Andy says, as she arranges tubes of antibiotic ointment next to rolls of gauze on the bedspread.

“I’m fine,” Joe says. “I had a bad dream last night, is all. I slept poorly.”

“Then you should rest before we go tonight,” Andy says. “Don’t be the reason we fuck this up.”

“Thanks, boss.”

She looks at him, sharp. “I’m serious, Joe,” she says. “If you need something, ask for it. Don’t pretend everything’s good until it’s not,” which is a lesson they learned years ago with Booker.

“It’s just,” he says, scrubbing a hand through his hair. “Do you have extra body armor?”

Horror washes over Andy’s face, and her sudden grip on his arm surprises him. “Joe,” she says, very quietly. “Are you—has it happened?”

“What?” he asks, caught off-guard, then realizes what she’s asking. “Oh, Andy, no. It’s nothing like that. I’m sorry for—no. I’ve just been thinking: we want to be quick tonight, right? In and out. No unnecessary injuries. I thought it might be wise for Quynh and Nicky to wear it, just to be safe.” He watches Andy relax, in increments, as he explains.

“Quynh’ll have it on anyway,” she says. “She always does.”

“Nicky, then,” he says. “Please.”

She’s suspicious again. “He okay?”

“He’s fine,” Joe says. “It’s for me. So that I don’t worry about him,” which is almost the whole truth.

“Okay,” Andy says. “And, yeah, we do. You want some too?”

The door opens. Quynh comes in, brandishing the crossword. “Andromache,” she says, “you really think ‘oboe duet’ is the answer to 41-Across: ‘dramatic musical interlude at the beginning of ‘Ode to Joy''?”

“It fits,” Andy sulks. She gives Joe one last searching look, then follows after Quynh to defend her answer, and leaves Joe to unpack tourniquets, medical tape, superglue, butterfly bandages.

Like the rest of the safehouse, the room is sparse, a double bed with white, bleachable sheets, made whiter in the stark autumn sunlight. A bedside table, a rug, suitcases leaning against the wall. Andy and Quynh already claimed a bedroom, so this one will be his and Nicky’s.

He sits on the edge of the bed, testing the mattress, new like everything else in the house. It’s silent, no creak of springs. He bounces once, and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide rolls across the coverlet to rest against his leg.

//

He had woken up in the angels’ vision, drowsy and content, and knew, in the limpid logic of dreams, that Nicky was full of their child. There had been a hyperrealism to those long nighttime minutes, the scent of jasmine through the open window, the texture of the pillow under his cheek. It felt right, reflexive, to reach for Nicky, to cup the sweet, taut curve of his belly.

As they lay together in the dark, Joe traced two pictures over Nicky’s stomach. He used his fingertips and went by muscle memory; first a portrait of Nicky, one tap against his hip to illustrate his beauty mark, and then Joe drew himself. He had been in the process of filling in the texture of his own beard—teasing, feather-light swirls low on Nicky’s stomach that made Nicky squirm back against him—when their baby woke up.

Over the years, Joe had helped Booker, a trained obstetrician, distributing prenatal vitamins in medical tents, holding women’s hands through miscarriages, bottle-feeding newborns as their exhausted parents slept, and reluctantly examining mucus plugs, but none of it had anything to do with his own life.

There was an odd, metrical rhythm to the movements. Joe kissed Nicky’s shoulder, and spread his fingers wide, concentrating.

Hiccups, he realized. Their baby had the hiccups.

//

It feels almost unfair, if Nicky already is. The last time they had sex, they rushed through it in the milking shed, the only place on the sheep farm with wifi. They had been memorizing the layout of the trillionaire’s mansion, quietly conferring over entry and exit points, when Nicky remembered a joke Quynh had told him that morning when she called with an update.

Nicky and Quynh shared an absurdist sense of humor that mystified everyone else in their family. Joe already knew the joke wouldn’t be funny, but it was a wonder to see Nicky try to tell it. He kept breaking just before the punchline, getting only a few words out before dissolving into laughter, and, watching him, Joe loved him to the point of pain.

The shed, like the farmhouse, was glacial, but had nine radiators. They turned all of them on and fucked on the concrete floor, steam hissing.

Unpacking done—carefully—Joe goes to find Nicky, but instead discovers Andy and Quynh giving Booker and Nile what sounds like an incredibly awkward sex talk. Nile looks furious, Booker mortified. Nicky hovers in the background, pretending to cook lunch.

Joe is confused until he glances at the kitchen table and sees the grocery bag, and next to it, the pregnancy tests. The bottom drops out of his stomach, and he sinks back against one of the clean white walls of their safehouse. No one notices him.

“I hear condoms work great nowadays,” says Quynh, a two-thousand-year-old lesbian. “You just put em on, like, _zip!_ Then you don’t have to worry about the risk of unplanned pregnancy in the midst of espionage.”

 _Zip!?_ Joe thinks.

“They’re not mine,” Nile grits out.

“Book, if you’re going to sneak off to buy secret pregnancy tests, at the very least you could share your concern with your partner,” Andy says, deeply disapproving.

“Nile’s not my—” Booker’s face is bright red. Under literally any other circumstances, Joe would be delighted, instead of horrified. “We haven’t even—”

With great interest, everyone waits for Booker to finish his sentence. Booker does not.

“Listen to me,” Nile says, “we’re not together. Booker, did you buy these?”

“No!” Booker says, aghast. “What would I even need them for?”

“I didn’t think you did. I didn’t buy them, either. Andy and Quynh, I know y’all didn’t. And Nicky and Joe wouldn’t need these.”

Everyone turns to look at them. Nicky is chopping up an onion, concentrating deeply on his task. Joe is still leaning—casually, he hopes—against the wall. “Well, where were they?” he asks, neutrally.

“In with the groceries,” Nile says. “That you picked up today.”

“Ah,” he says, “well, someone must have left them in the bag.” The receipt is currently marking Nicky’s place in _The Nonexistent Knight_ , thank the ever-merciful Allah.

“It was a reusable bag, Joe. From the Trader Joe’s in my old neighborhood in Chicago.”

Nicky looks at Joe with crazy eyes, then says, “Well, it’s right there in the name, isn’t it? Bónus.”


	4. Booker

Phillipe “Flip” Bukvar and Neptune Watercourse attend the trillionaire’s party arm-in-arm.

Flip (to his friends) is the many-times-great-grandson of a French dauphin, and, through his deceased stepfather Sergei, heir to a Russian chemical factory fortune. He is a graduate of Sorbonne Université and runs a small private psychology practice by the foreign embassies in Neuilly-sur-Seine.

Neptune Watercourse is an art historian by way of Cornell University (before the floodwaters forced it to close), and the curator of a highly successful gallery along the new eastern coastline of the United States, in Asheville. The pieces she showcases sell for hundreds of millions of dollars, and are always highly sought-after.

Flip and Neptune met, as loving couples sometimes do, at a political rally to shut refugees out of the remaining habitable parts of the United States, and are now engaged to be married.

“Don’t do the accent,” Booker says to her, selecting two crystalline flutes of champagne off a waiter’s tray and handing her one. “I am going to use my French accent, and you are going to be overwhelmed by the need to do your Hercule Poirot impression, but I am begging you now, don’t.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Neptune Watercourse demurs, accepting the champagne. Then she adds, just under her breath, “Eet eez _offensant_ zat you zink Ah could pozzsiblee do zat.”

Her fake French accent is such a stupid thing to find hot.

“My stunning fiancée,” he says, “this is a mission-critical request.”

“I know,” she replies. Then adds in flawless French, “As you’ll recall, I’m the one who planned the mission.”

Nile has had a great time over the years passing herself off as her own descendants and making up a truly impressive variety of husbands and life circumstances. She likes to choose river-themed names (“family tradition”), and in addition to Mme. Watercourse, maintains separate identities as Alluvia Silt, Briné Delta, Marsha Euphrates, and Loire le Fleuve.

Over the last few years, she’s gotten Booker in on this too. He likes to push his names to very edge of credulity, to make her laugh. Flip Bukvar has also led lives as Magnus Opus, Werther von Gutenberg, Jackson Marginalia, and Rags Hardback, a jazz musician.

When Joe and Nicky protested their increasingly absurd aliases, Nile cut in: “Joe, your favorite alias is Joe Jones.”

“It’s subtle!” Joe insisted.

Nicky, who went by Nicholas Smith, or Smith-Jones, if he was feeling sentimental, said nothing in his husband’s defense.

Neptune Watercourse is a beautiful woman, jewels glinting at her neck and wrists, gold braided through her hair. Her dress, cut to emphasize the curve of her waist, slinks over her body in a rich, shimmering green, and makes her skin look luminous. He once saw her kill a man with only dental floss.

“You’re staring, Flip,” she says, the corner of her mouth ticking up.

Because I’m in love with you, he does not say, and stares down to his champagne instead. They’ve ducked into a little alcove of the mansion, men in tuxedos and women in gowns flowing past them. He looks up at her again, and she smiles at him over the rim of her glass.

“You look good in green,” he says hoarsely.

“Yeah?” she says, then reaches up to straighten his bowtie.

He swallows, his Adam’s apple bumping against her warm knuckles. She could kiss him right now, if she wanted to, and he would let her. If she asked him to, he would get down on his knees right here, and ease up her dress, and—

“There,” she says, and her hands leave his neck. “You look good too. You look handsome.”

“Handsome enough to be convincing as the heir to a Russian chemical factory?” he asks. There’s a slight, strange tremor in his voice, and he clears his throat to get rid of it.

“Oh my God, a chemical factory?” she says. “ _Pssh_. I’d even say successor to plutonium-processing facility.”

Daring, his hand finds her waist. “Is that more or less handsome than a chemical factory heir?” he asks.

She leans in, breath hot against his neck, and his eyes slip closed. “Much more handsome,” she says. Then, “C’mon, Flip, we gotta go mingle.”

She takes him by the hand and leads him into a den of rich fascists.

//

Over the course of the evening, they meet a lot of people whom Booker would happily murder without a single trace of remorse.

People can only become so wealthy before they develop a kind of dementia, and forget basic empathy. Mental erosion, he thinks, as the heavy salon doors swing back to hit yet another partygoer in the face; no one here holds doors open. They just stride through, careless in the way only people who grew up with maids can be.

The salon, one of several galleries in the mansion, is the central nerve of the party tonight, and full of wire sculptures twisted to the shapes of people and animals, all seeming to crouch down in supplication. People keep tripping over their hands and paws as they reach down to pat the sculptures’ metal heads. The sculptures are all hollow, a tornado of wire wrapping around to form each torso, limb, and tail. None of them have faces. They could almost be mannequins.

Members of the recently deposed British royal family share the opinion that immigrants are a drain on the country’s economy. Close by, doctors and scientists enthuse about prosperity counseling, the latest far-right pet theory, in which refugees and the working-class are advised to never have children, to ease the burden on the rest of society. People in fine clothes stand around, nodding and eating pretty little hors d'oeuvres that the waiters offer.

Booker, at the edge of the circle, thinks back to the six years he spent in the subbasement in Le Marais, forging passports and birth certificates.

“And what do you think, Phillipe?” a blond woman in a cream-silk dress asks. “As a psychologist, I mean. People keep having children they can’t take care of in the middle of warzones, then begging us for help.”

“I’m not sure I quite understand what you’re asking,” he says.

“Well, what’s wrong with them?” she says. “If my house was on fire, I wouldn’t try to have another child before I left.” A few people around her titter with laughter. “I’d just go,” she says. “I’d run.”

“Where would you go,” he asks, “if your house was on fire?”

Across the room, Nile gives him a warning look. She’s talking to the trillionaire’s personal assistant, a redheaded young man with nervous, rabbit-like eyes.

“Well, right here, I think,” the woman says, arch, and the group around them laughs. “There’s certainly more than enough room.”

“There is,” he says, and makes himself smile at her. He wants to spit.

“So what makes them do it?” she asks. “Wishful thinking? Ignorance? It’s why we’re all here tonight to solve this problem, isn’t it? Because they can’t stop fucking each other and then watching their children die.”

The room narrows. It’s just him and this woman, her thin-lipped smirk, her watery eyes. He thinks of his sons, dead at 12 and 17 and 42. His heartbeat is a tidal wave in his ears.

“Probably some combination of the two,” comes a voice, followed by a hand on his elbow. Nile tucks herself under his arm, then nods to the woman. “Neptune Watercourse,” she says. “I see you’ve already met my rather taciturn fiancé. And you would be Mrs. Deardorff, of The Deardorff Fertility Institute, I presume?”

“Neptune!” the woman exclaims. “I’ve been wanting to meet you all night. Call me Shaylee. There’s a piece in your collection right now that my husband and I have had our eyes on for weeks. By that girl from Atlanta? Ooh! It’s so _urban_. So eclectic. It’d be perfect in our foyer.”

“I think I know just the piece you mean, Shaylee.” Nile smiles pleasantly at her, her grip around Booker’s waist tightening. In reality, Joe, Nile, and Quynh paint and sculpt everything in the Asheville gallery. “Let’s talk, if you’d like,” Nile says, and she and the woman walk away together, chatting.

Booker excuses himself too, and stalks away through the cavernous pale hallways of the trillionaire’s mansion. He wants a drink, badly, so he doesn’t have one. He walks until it’s less populated, instead of circles of people, just little knots in twos and threes, and then he sits down at the edge of a thirty-foot-high window, glass cool against his back. He breathes.

From here he can see the chauffeurs, standing around and smoking by their cars. He looks for Nicky and finds him, far to the left and some distance away from everyone else, half-hidden behind a hedgerow. Nicky occasionally glances up, toward Quynh on the roof, Booker presumes. Otherwise, he stands, looking out into the night. Andy and Joe are should be in the building right now, dragging the investor off to his death. If it goes as well as last time, they’ll be gone without a single ripple to the party. No one will notice the investor is even missing for weeks.

Far off, through the mansion’s warren of rooms, walls caked in priceless art, there is a faint pop. Another. _Nile_ , he thinks, panic surging, and starts to run. Back to her, toward gunfire.

//

Seventy years ago, three weeks into Booker’s capture and imprisonment in a dank, subterranean cell, a guard fell in a bright spray of blood at the end of a long hallway, and Joe appeared, saw Booker, and ran to him.

“Mon frère,” Joe said as he began to pick the lock, his eyes alight with tears, and a familiar shame twisted inside Booker.

“I’m sorry,” he began. What he wanted to ask, but didn’t, was, Do you still hate me?

“Shut up,” said Joe, fierce. “Just shut up, Sébastien.”

“Is Quynh okay?” he asked.

“She’s fine,” Joe said, eyes fixed on his task. “She’s safe with Andy.”

“That’s good,” Booker said, and winced. Ten years, and he had forgotten how to talk to Joe. Every word felt stiff, jagged. “You look fine.”

Joe laughed, disbelievingly. “Thank you,” he said.

“And Nile—how is she?”

“She’s doing great.” One of the picks broke. “Shit,” Joe said, and dug into his bag for another.

“And,” he made himself say it, “Andy? She’s okay?”

“No one’s shot her, if that’s what you mean,” Joe said coolly, and fit the picks back into the lock. Metal clicked and protested.

“And how is Nicky?”

“I’ll leave you down here,” Joe said, “if you try to talk about my husband again.” The tools in his hands stilled. “It is because of you that I had to lie there, strapped down, and watch him be tortured for hours. Keep his name out of your fucking mouth.”

“Joe,” he began.

“No,” Joe said. “I’ll tell them I couldn’t find you. That I searched every single cell.” He looked at Booker. “That you were nowhere. Do you understand?”

“I do,” Booker said.

“Good,” Joe said, and went back to work.

//

Later, bundled back to their safehouse in the Swiss Alps, Booker went to see her. Quynh had arranged herself like a cat in a wide, sun-washed window in clothes clearly did not belong to her: A Tribe Called Quest T-shirt, sweatpants, and a pair of woolen socks. But what his eyes went to was the band-aid on her finger.

A paper cut, she told him.

When she had kissed Andy again, Quynh said, she felt a small internal mechanism shift in herself, a little give in her soul, like the stuck minute hand on a clock finally ticking again, and she began to age.

“You’re crying, Sébastien,” she said.

“I’m happy for you,” he told her.

“No, you’re not,” she said, and smiled at him. “You want us all to live forever. Even you.”

“ _You’re_ happy,” he said.

“Anything is better than drowning,” Quynh said, philosophical. She drew her knees up in front of her. “Sit with me,” she said, and turned back to the window, and the blue-tinged whiteness of the snow beyond.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Looking for avalanches,” she said.

//

Booker never told the rest of the team, but his older sister, Francine, outlived his wife and sons by decades. Francine began to teach in their small village school when she was 18, and he was 13. Over the course of a year, Francine fell in love with Honore, another schoolteacher, and, like their mother once had, fled the house in the middle of the night and ran away, this time back to Paris.

In Paris, Francine kept teaching, and Honore followed her own mother’s path and became a midwife and abortionist. In between wars, he served as Honore’s assistant, and lived in their spare room. Toward the end of their lives, he took care of them. Francine and Honore, who never had children themselves, once said that he was like a son to them.

//

Booker is within spitting distance of the salon when he is wrestled backwards through a pocket door and into a darkened gallery of porcelain houses.

The room is dim, houses’ windows just holes of shadow, and Booker swings his elbow back hard, makes contact. His assailant lets go with a grunt, and Booker pivots on his heel, braced for the next blow, but it doesn’t come.

Joe raises his hands, fear on his face like Booker has never seen before. “I didn’t mean to scare you,” Joe says rapidly, each word running into the next. “Have you seen Nicky?”

“ _Have I seen Nicky?_ ” The question is disorienting. “What are you doing here? Where’s Andy?”

“Nicky’s not with the chauffeurs anymore,” Joe says. “Sébastien, if you know where he is, tell me now.”

“Joe,” Booker says, dread clenching his stomach. “Did something happen to Andy? Was she—”

“She’s fine, I think,” Joe interrupts. “Nicky—”

The porcelain houses rattle with a volley of explosions from down the corridor. Booker throws himself to the ground, covering the back of his neck, but instead of joining him, Joe runs to the door and looks out. The door is almost shut, just an inch of space open, and all Booker can see is the blur of many people running in the same direction.

“You think Andy’s fine,” Booker says, pushing himself up, “or you know?”

“She was fine when I left,” Joe says, and begins to pace. Most of the houses are waist-height and brightly glazed, and arranged in patterns of neighborhoods. Joe prowls between them, antsy and trapped-looking.

“Why—” More bombs go off in the distance, and a woman screams, high and ringing. “Why did you leave Andy? What happened?”

“There were gunshots,” Joe says, and darts back to the door again, scanning the hallway. “Listen, if you don’t know where Nicky is, then—”

“So you just left Andy alone with the mark?” Booker demands, and follows him.

“I killed him first,” Joe says, irritably brushing Booker’s hand off. “I have to go,” he says.

Booker grabs Joe’s arm again. “Where did you leave Andy with the body?”

“Behind the wall of the unused pantry off the second kitchen in the East Wing like we agreed,” Joe says, impatient, trying to pull away. He steps back and his heel connects to one the houses with a brittle clunk. “Just let me—”

“Get the fuck back there,” Booker says. “Are you crazy? She’s mortal. You think you can just walk out in the middle of a mission and, and what, double-check that your husband’s all right? You selfish motherfucker.”

It feels bizarre to be the one delivering this lecture instead of receiving it, but it’s also impossible to believe that Joe would leave Andy alone to risk her life.

“You don’t understand,” Joe says, shoving past him, toward the door, but Booker gropes for a fistful of Joe’s tactical vest, yanks him back.

“You’re gonna go out there, looking like that, into this fucking Nazi jamboree, and wait for me to tell you that’s a good idea? You don’t care about the rest of us at all, do you?”

It’s an old argument they still dance around sometimes, and something he and Joe used to fight about before Booker betrayed their team. _You and Nicky have each other_ , Booker used to snap at him when Joe hauled him out of bars and threw a blanket over him as he fell asleep on the couch. _You have no idea what it’s like to be alone_.

Booker only said it to watch Joe react, guilt mixing with anger on his face, but he never denied it, because they both knew it was true: Joe had Nicky. Booker and Andy had only each other, and sometimes all that meant was drinking vodka and orange juice on the rooftops of their safehouses while listening to Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” and belting out the lyrics at the moon.

Before Nile joined their family, and before Quynh came back, Joe and Nicky said goodbye after missions and departed together for one of their many homes, cozy flats in cities, cottages by cliffsides, Joe spinning stories, Nicky laughing in his ear. When they were gone, Booker and Andy nodded at each other and left in opposite directions. There were whole years they both spent almost entirely alone.

“Let go of me,” Joe says quietly. His hand closes over Booker’s wrist. The hold isn’t tight, but the threat is clear anyway.

“Joe,” Booker says, “you know I’m right. You’ll give us away. You might kill Andy or Quynh. You really want to spend the rest of your life knowing it’s your fault that they’re gone?”

Eighty years ago, when Booker pulled his gun on Andy, he almost shot her in the head, instead of the gut, worried she would fight too much. How close he came to murdering her still haunts him, and sometimes even now when he talks to her, the memory superimposes itself: her shirt, dark-wet with blood, how betrayal tore holes in her voice. It’s not something you recover from doing to someone you love.

The gunfire is steadier now, mounting, almost constant. Joe looks at the door again, toward wherever Nicky might be, and makes a low, pained sound in his throat. Tears build in his eyes.

Booker realizes what’s happening an instant before it does and just manages to turn his head before Joe’s fist connects with his jaw. His teeth clap together, catching the edge of his tongue, and blood fills his mouth.

“Why,” he says, still holding onto Joe’s vest, just barely. “Why would you—”

“I’m sorry,” Joe begins, but Booker kicks him in the ribs, cracking at least one. Joe sinks to his knees with a gasp.

Swallowing blood, Booker aims another kick, but in the space of a breath, Joe’s back on his feet, dodging Booker’s elbow, and his next punch catches Booker in the ear. Booker seizes the front of Joe’s shirt and pulls, and together they stumble sideways into one of the houses, snapping it clean off its foundation.

“Please stay down,” Joe pleads, shards of porcelain swiveling around them, his knee digging into Booker’s sternum. “I’ll explain later, okay? I need to go find—”

Booker headbutts him.

The pocket door slides open. They manage to stagger behind one of the houses just as Shaylee Deardorff clicks in, sour-faced, trailed by her thick-necked husband, Browden.

“The only good thing about these stupid parties is leaving them,” Shaylee says, removing a vape pen from her clutch.

“At least we got to see your friends,” Browden says.

“Book,” Joe breathes. “I don’t want to do this, but—” He lunges.

“So fucking don’t!” Booker whisper-screams, blocking a blow as he and Joe silently roll through the shadows of the houses, clawing at each other. “Why are you crying? Just—fuck! Fucking tell me what’s going on!”

“It’s an excuse to see who’s who, at least,” Shaylee says, exhaling. “Although I can’t believe they let that girl in. Do you know, I was complimenting her on how resilient her people are, and she had the gall to interrupt and say they shouldn’t have to be? I was _stunned_ ; she was so rude.”

“Haven’ll cut down on people like her,” Browden says, accepting the vape pen. “What’s-her-name. Nile?”

Booker and Joe both freeze in horror, Booker’s thumb on Joe’s eyeball, Joe’s fist in Booker’s hair, before Browden continues, laughing, “West Nile Virus?”

“It’s Neptune,” Shaylee sniffs. “But I do really want to buy that piece for the foyer. It’d be a nice pop of color in the Christmas photos.”

“The ocean’ll keep rising,” Browden says. “Swallow that little gallery of hers right up soon.” He coughs, and a haze rises over the houses. “It’s nice that he asked all of us to help determine the immigration quotas.”

“We’re the ones paying,” Shaylee says. “We should be the ones who decide who gets to stay. It’s only fair.”

The pocket door slides shut. Booker and Joe stare at each other, wide-eyed. Then Joe knocks him out.

//

When Booker wakes up, his own blood tacky on his face, all the lights are off, and Nile is sitting cross-legged next to him. She’s changed out of her dress into jeans and the puffy black parka she got in Toronto a couple years back. The makeup is gone from her face, and he can see the little raised scar on her temple from where she and her brother once dueled with icicles in the park when they were children.

She told him that story when they were staking out a target in the middle of the Mojave Desert. He had forgotten to pack sunblock, and for hours kept burning and healing, over and over, an almost unbearably itchy experience. It had been soothing, to imagine the clear crispness of a Chicago winter, and Nile in it, laughing as she darted after her brother through the first snow.

She looks worried, and touches his face. He tips his cheek into her warm palm. His nose is crusted with blood; it’s hard to breathe.

“Hey Neptune,” he murmurs, then everything rushes back at once. He shoves himself up. “The gunshots before—are you all right?”

“Fireworks,” Nile says. “It was some last-minute, plus-one asshat’s birthday, and they brought along a whole pyrotechnic display.”

“Oh,” he says, and lays back down, porcelain crunching under his spine. “That’s good, I guess.”

“Booker,” she says. “What happened to you?”

“It was—,” but he remembers the wild panic on Joe’s face, and the rest of the sentence dies in his throat. For a moment he and Nile just watch each other, the light from the hallway a small twinned star in each eye. She bites her lower lip, a nervous habit. “I was drinking,” he tells her.

Nile’s hand leaves his cheek. She sits back on her heels, and the disappointment on her face is terrible to see.

“Are the others okay?” he asks, and rolls onto his side, coughing as half-clotted blood slides down the back of his throat. Joe must have broken his nose.

“Everyone’s good,” she says. “Joe and Andy got separated the fireworks started—he went to see what was going on and couldn’t back through the crowds—but otherwise the plan went off without a hitch.”

“I’m glad.” He pushes himself to his feet. A sharp line of pain throbs from his left eyebrow to the back of his head; they heal from everything, but concussions are the worst.

“You don’t smell like booze,” Nile comments, as they begin to pick their way to the door.

He doesn't say anything. They hit a cul-de-sac of miniature houses and part, walking down parallel side streets.

It would be easier to tell Nile the truth, but something makes him hesitate. There was a wholly new desperation on Joe’s face as he fought to get back to Nicky. Something is wrong, but Booker doesn’t know what. The most obvious answer is that Nicky has become mortal like Andy and Quynh, but the very idea makes him want to throw up.

When he lost his wife Élodie, the grief drove nails into him for years, puncturing him bit by bit. He used to think that losing her had destroyed most of him, or all the good parts, at least. By the time he shot Andy, all that was left was dregs, just bitterness and self-pity and the dull horror of near-eternal solitude.

For all his jealousy of Joe and Nicky’s marriage, he loves them. Last week, Joe knelt with Booker at 4 a.m. in the dewy grass of sheep farm’s meadow, helping deliver an out-of-season lamb. When the lamb slid from its mother’s body, Booker disinfected its navel, then its mother began to lick it clean. Booker’s legs were numb from inactivity and cold; they had heard the ewe calling just after midnight, and had come outside to find her. Booker stood and stretched, groaning, then turned to Joe to complain, but Joe’s expression made him stop: his face was all soft wonder. Joe wore only a thin undershirt and long johns, his sweatshirt spread beneath the ewe and lamb to shield them from the wet grass.

He never wants Joe to find out what it’s like.

He gets to the door just ahead of Nile, slides it open. She slips by him, a stiff line to her shoulders. The hallway is tall and dark around them, the only sound the slight echo of their footsteps. The mansion’s architecture seems designed to mess with people's sense of scale, leaving visitors to tower over model houses in one room, only to be dwarfed by a three-story passageway the next. It’s a woozy, nightmarish effect. All he wants is to go home.

He and Nile are sharing the Reykjavík safehouse’s third bedroom, a paper partition wall wedged between two double beds. In most of their safehouses, they end up like this, first by default as the only non-couple, but eventually out of choice. They fall asleep most nights talking about nothing in particular. Sometimes, just before Nile falls completely asleep, she lapses into the conversation of dreams.

Twenty years ago in Ebina, they lay next to each other on futons, watching the weft of clouds pass through the open window. They had been discussing the worst possible foods to eat on first dates, coming up with increasingly ridiculous suggestions. Booker began with an entire package of cold cuts, eaten with one’s hands, only to be crushed by Nile, who proposed yogurt, but eaten with a knife. Booker countered with individual grapes, eaten one by one with a fondue fork, and Nile came in strong, with a martini glass of warm jello. Fifteen minutes later, Booker was convinced that he had won, with biting into an unpeeled kiwi like a hard-boiled egg, but was met with only the sound of soft breathing.

He turned onto his side and looked at her. Her mouth was slightly open in sleep, her eyelashes dark and long. In front of her, her fingers tensed and relaxed and tensed again. “I’ve never been to Tennessee,” she said to someone in her dream, then, “but, sure, if you need tomatoes, buy ‘em.”

It was as sudden as that: he was in love with her. He had been struck and killed by lightning twice before, and this felt very similar: jolted into absolute, excruciating stillness.

“Fuck,” he said softly to the ceiling. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”

“Hey.” They've been crawling through a narrow storage space for the last twenty minutes, silently proceeding through millions of dollars of artwork. “Say you’re right,” he says. “Say I wasn’t drunk.”

“So don’t lie to me,” she says, inching past a twelve-foot-tall oil painting of cherubs. “I don’t want you going back to how you used to be.”

“A fuck-up, you mean,” he says, and helps her step over the ornate frame.

“No,” she corrects him, “lonely. You do this thing sometimes where you cut yourself off from everyone else, and force the rest of us watch you be a martyr, and it sucks. You don’t have to tell me what happened tonight if you don’t want to, but don’t act like this. And don’t lie to me.”

It feels awful, hearing this from her, because she’s right. His first impulse is to divert the conversation, to make a joke or invent another lie, but what he wants more is what they usually have: just the ease of their friendship.

“Okay,” he says, and takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry.”

She reaches over and takes his hand.

“I’m okay,” he tells her.

“I know you’re okay,” she says. “I just like doing this. You feel good.”

“Yeah?” he says.

She looks over at him, then squeezes his hand. “Yeah, Sébastien. You know how worried I was when you didn’t show up? Shit, dude. You’re my best friend. And honestly, you should feel lucky; my last best friend was Tamika Carrollton in twelfth-grade, and she was head drum major of the marching band, so you have a lot to compete with.”

“You’re mine too,” he says. “And I do feel lucky. The last best friend I had was Pierre Petit, and all he had going for him was that he was good at dominoes.”

“That was his actual, human, Christian name,” Nile says. “His legal name. Pierre Petit.”

“Laugh it up, Loire le Fleuve.”

“You helped me pick that one out!”

They’re getting close to one of the exits, a jump from a second-story window. Not ideal, but almost undetectable.

“What did you look like?” Nile asks suddenly. “Growing up, I mean.”

“Honestly?” Booker says, and braces his foot on the ledge, mentally preparing to fall and break at least one ankle. “I had terrible acne.”

He sees it catch her off-guard, and she laughs, and climbs up next to him. Then she kisses him. The angle is off; she gets his chin at first, before his hand comes up to meet her jaw. He tilts his head, kisses her properly, how she should be kissed. She grabs his lapels, pulls him into her, still laughing, and they fall back together against the window frame. He loves her.

“It scared me, not knowing where you were,” she says against his mouth when they finally pull away from each other.

He thinks of Joe, the tears in his eyes as he swung his fist forward. He still doesn’t know what happened, but he thinks he understands.

“Thank you for coming back for me,” he says, and opens the window.

They jump down together, skimming through the night.

//

They reconvene at a Polish restaurant on Féllsmuli Street to get borscht and pierogies. The owners, three sisters, send over fish stew and steaming bowls of kasha, because Andy has a vantablack sense of humor that old Eastern European women, and also Quynh, love.

The restaurant is decorated simply, wood-paneled walls and a silver-robed Virgin Mary high in an icon corner above a jukebox of ancient Eurovision hits. An enormous Maine Coon cat sprawls on top of the jukebox, chirping at moths that circle the light (“Please forgive Wisława Szymborska,” says one of the women, nodding at the Maine Coon. “She’s chatty as hell.”).

“And then he said, _I’m going to peel your skin off!_ ” Andy says in impeccable Polish, and Quynh chortles into her stuffed cabbage rolls, slapping the bar top.

“Do you think that’ll happen to us, as we get older?” Nile says out of the corner of her mouth to Booker, heaping sour cream into her soup.

They’re alone at a little round table. Andy and Quynh are at the bar with the owners, making upsetting jokes about death that have them all doubled over, laughing. Joe and Nicky, both unusually quiet, made an excuse and left together before everyone ordered. Booker tried to catch Joe's eye, but Joe only shook his head. He looked utterly drained. Nicky seemed fine, no telling injuries, but his arm shook hard as he wrapped it around Joe's waist, Joe sagging into him as they walked away.

“Which part?” asks Booker, trying to concentrate. “How evisceration becomes funny, or a love of compression socks?”

Nile grins at him. She’s put her braids up in a side ponytail, gold still woven into her hair and glinting in the overhead light. There is a single piece of dill clinging to her upper lip. He wants to kiss her again so badly it feels gravitational, drawing him toward her.

“After we finish eating, wanna get out of here?” she asks. When he raises an eyebrow at her, she hastens to add, “A walk, I mean. There’s a Chuck Norris-themed bar around here that people seem to like, and it’s really important to me that you understand American culture, so.”

She eats a pierogi. In the background, Wisława Szymborska yowls, and Quynh makes a dismaying pun about amputation.

Then he says, in her Hercule Poirot impression, “Zere eez a Chuck Noreez-themed bar, deed you say? What the hell, let’s go.”

They finish their borscht, say goodbye to Andy and Quynh, and do.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on Tumblr @ signsandcymbals for bonus (and Bónus) story notes and a variety of dumb character vision boards.


End file.
